From Pitch Deck to Platform: How In-House Counsel Guides Claims, Privacy/AI, and SaaS Deals for Tech-Enabled Products

A product “launches” the moment its story is told—often first to investors. Those early claims can later reappear as marketing promises, performance messaging, and customer-facing assertions that require substantiation and careful disclosure.

Using a workshop hypothetical (an AI-driven wearable product), this session tracks how messaging evolves from investor narrative to consumer acquisition and operational touchpoints—highlighting where in-house counsel can most effectively guide the business: aligning claims across audiences, pressure-testing substantiation early, and building practical guardrails that teams can follow without slowing go-to-market execution. We’ll also address securities-law compliance and transactional issues that frequently surface alongside early-stage growth decisions.

Key Takeaways:

• How to align investor narratives with consumer-facing claims and substantiation requirements
• Common pitfalls in subscriptions, pricing, and e-commerce UX that can create deceptive-practices exposure
• Practical guardrails for influencers, testimonials, reviews, promotions, and performance claims
• Where generative/agentic AI in product functionality and marketing execution changes the risk landscape

Personalization and targeted advertising are accelerating—driven by AI, biometrics, and data analytics across the customer journey. At the same time, privacy and AI governance obligations are expanding and fragmenting across jurisdictions, creating uncertainty for fast-moving product and marketing teams.

This session focuses on the real questions in-house counsel are asked to answer: what’s required, what’s defensible, what needs to be documented, and what operational changes are necessary to stay ahead of enforcement risk. We’ll cover consumer privacy compliance, responsible AI deployment, and biometric regulations—through a practical, scalable lens designed for counsel guiding teams where the tools and rules keep changing.

Key takeaways:

• A workable framework for evaluating AI use cases, disclosures, and privacy obligations quickly and consistently
• How to operationalize consent, consumer rights, and data governance without breaking UX or slowing launches
• How biometric requirements intersect with product design, authentication, and analytics
• Enforcement and risk themes affecting ad tech and personalization—and how to reduce exposure

SaaS tools aren’t “just vendors” anymore—they’re core infrastructure. For in-house counsel, the risk often isn’t the signature moment; it’s what happens later: an outage, a security incident, an AI feature change, a renewal with no leverage, or a termination that turns into operational lock-in.

This session walks through the SaaS lifecycle from an in-house perspective—selection, contracting, renewals, and ongoing governance—focusing on the terms that matter most when things go wrong (and the negotiation strategies that help protect the business while still enabling speed). We’ll cover pricing mechanics, SLAs, liability, data ownership, security, termination/transition, and AI-specific provisions increasingly embedded in platform agreements.

Key takeaways:

• The SaaS clauses that most often drive downstream pain during incidents, renewals, and exits
• How to negotiate AI-related contract terms (data use, training, outputs, IP, indemnities, and liability)
• Practical approaches to termination and transition rights that reduce lock-in and protect continuity
• How to build a scalable intake/review process that aligns legal, security, IT, and procurement

Connect with peers and Davis+Gilbert attorneys over drinks and light bites following the program