Beth Stevens | Sword Health __________________________________________________________________________________
Before law, she worked in cost and risk analysis for intelligence and military clients at Booz Allen Hamilton, then earned a JD and MBA from Northwestern before realizing startups suited her better than law firms. Legal leadership roles at Sidecar, Earnest, OpenDoor, and One followed, sharpening a practical view of risk shaped by scaling businesses rather than avoiding uncertainty.“ There is risk in everything you do. If you try to get a company perfectly risk-adjusted, you will not have a business. It’ s not possible, particularly when you’ re on the cutting edge.”
That experience also taught her to leave room for experimentation.“ The law is very gray, not black or white. I like to let people run, then build in legal review at the right time. That way, you get creative solutions that benefit the consumer, follow the spirit of the law, and are easy to defend,” she reflects.
Running legal
The balance between oversight and enablement shapes how Beth leads her own team. She is convinced legal expertise alone can’ t sustain a modern department.“ It’ s no longer the case that lawyers can just run a legal department. In fact, they’ re often not great at it. I do not need to read an NDA if not a single word changes. What our legal ops team helps us do is figure out what we can automate, templatize, and let the business self-serve.”
AI has sharpened that philosophy. Beth and her colleagues tested extensively before adopting anything.“ We have literally tested everything out there. Very few have made it through our gauntlet. I’ m pleasantly surprised after we tried to break them,” she observes.
The team now uses AI to accelerate research, support contract review, and streamline work with outside counsel, arriving at conversations already informed.“ This gives us enough tooling to get probably 90 to 95 percent of the answer, sometimes 100. Then we’ re already well informed, and we’ re just putting it in context with outside counsel.”
The same principle applies beyond legal. Sword is automating parts of its contract workflow across commercial, procurement, and legal teams.“ It’ s always easier to edit than to write from scratch. AI isn’ t 100 percent perfect yet, but it still speeds us up quite a bit.”
Managing the unknown
Two connected priorities dominate Beth’ s focus right now: helping her legal team keep adapting to AI, and helping Sword navigate the shifting regulatory landscape around AI-enabled healthcare.
The internal shift is as much about people as it is about technology.“ This is probably one of the most transformative moments for how legal professionals work,” she says.
Externally, the uncertainty runs deeper, as regulation continues to take shape across countries, states, and markets.“ We don’ t know
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