Artificial Intelligence

Legal strategy for companies building with, licensing, and deploying AI

Every company is now an AI company, whether or not it was in your plan. Your engineers are using code assistants. Your marketing team is generating content. Your product roadmap has a model in it. Your vendors have quietly updated their terms to permit training on your data.

Most of the resulting legal questions have no settled answer yet. They are still worth handling deliberately. Companies addressing them now will be in a far better position than companies leaving them alone.

HMLG works on AI the way we work on everything else. Practically, from the business problem backward.

What AI Legal Counsel Covers

• AI vendor and licensing agreements. What the provider may do with your inputs, whether your data trains their models, who owns outputs, indemnification, and what happens if the model changes or the service ends.
• Training data and rights clearance. Understanding what data a model was built on, what rights were needed, and what your exposure looks like across the stack.
• Ownership of AI-assisted output. How ownership and protectability are handled for content, code, and designs created with AI involvement, and how to document human contribution.
• Internal AI policy. Practical, enforceable policies covering what employees and contractors may use, what data may go into which tools, and what requires review.
• Bias, discrimination, and transparency. Policies and review processes for automated decisions affecting people.
• Product and disclosure obligations. Emerging state and federal requirements around AI disclosure, automated decision-making, and consumer notice.
• Privacy and data protection. Where AI use intersects with GDPR, CCPA, COPPA, and biometric and automated decision rules.
• Diligence. Assessing AI risk when buying, selling, or investing in a company using or building AI.

The Questions Clients Bring Us

Clients ask whether they can use a given AI vendor with customer data. Who owns what their team generates with these tools, and whether the output is protectable. What is my exposure if a model was trained on material the provider did not have rights to. What do we tell customers about how AI is used in my product. Do I need an internal AI policy and what should it actually say.

Answering these requires understanding the technology, the contracts, and the business at the same time. The combination is rarer than it should be.

Why HMLG

HMLG lawyers have worked at the intersection of technology, content, and rights for decades, including through the last two occasions when a new technology outran the existing legal framework. Digital music was one. Streaming and platform distribution was another.

With AI, the adoption pattern is familiar. Rights questions arrive before the rules do, and the companies structuring their agreements thoughtfully in the gap are the ones still standing when the rules arrive.

This is also fundamentally licensing work. Who owns it, who may use it, on what terms, in what territory, for how long. HMLG has been building that practice for years, and AI is a new asset class inside it.

Last reviewed August 2026