What Kyle Built
A note on Kyle Turner’s two years with VAILL
Our VAILL team is wrapping up a summer of firm engagements and getting ready for the fall semester, and we are doing it with one fewer person than we started with. We are sharing this with immense pride—and more than a little sadness. Kyle Turner has departed the VAILL team and will join Dollar General as an in-house AI attorney. His title here was Assistant Director of Emerging Technology and Digital Initiatives and VAILL Collaborator, which undersold the job considerably.
The Work Inside the Building
We’re incredibly lucky at Vanderbilt Law to have access to so many amazing tools. That doesn’t happen by accident. If someone at Vanderbilt Law—student, faculty, staff, librarian—got their hands on a legal technology tool in the last two years, Kyle is the reason.
Kyle led the onboarding for Harvey and Legora for our students and brought in DepoSim, Everlaw, iManage, Luminance, and LegalTech Hub. Written out like that, it reads like a procurement list, but in plain English, it means that our students here have actually used the platforms most folks only read about in vendor blog posts and conference recaps. Getting a tool into a law school takes considerably more than just enthusiasm for the tool. It takes vendor conversations, licensing terms, account provisioning, faculty buy-in, and then the far less visible work of building something for students to do once the accounts go live. That’s days, weeks (months) of work, and Kyle did all of that, repeatedly, for tools that largely didn’t exist in legal education just a few years ago.
The other half of the on-campus job was teaching, and there was a lot of it. Kyle taught our Legal Practice Technology course, co-taught the VAILL Practicum with Cat, and co-taught Law Firm Practice Simulation with me. And his upper-division courses always had a waiting list. He guest lectured in many a clinic and class on AI tools, taught in our 1L curriculum, helped develop the AI instruction running in our research sections, and co-taught our annual 1L AI Bootcamp. That is a lot of different rooms, and each one needed its own version of the material, because what a 1L needs from an AI session looks very different from what a clinic student or a practicum student building something real needs.
The Work Outside the Building
He also led our firm engagement partnerships, which is where a good deal of VAILL’s practitioner-facing work came from. Over the past two summers, our VAILL team has worked directly with law firms across the country to help them integrate AI into their practice. That work never ran on a reused slide deck. So, no cookie-cutter anything, for firms of any size and any starting skill level. To accomplish that, someone had to sit down with firm leadership to find the actual pain points, build a custom education plan and custom content around what each firm needed, and analyze survey data from the firm’s own attorneys so the final report reflected where that firm actually was and where they could go. That was Kyle!
He has created and presented dozens of CLEs over the years, ranging from sessions for the Tennessee and Nashville Bar Associations to national audiences and firm/in-house presentations. You can even watch one of them for free— his session for Clio’s Legal AI Advanced Certification is awesome!
And Kyle was always kind enough to agree to any conference presentation I would pitch and jump in for the travel. Part of our VAILL mission is to share what we do and help others do the same work for themselves. Kyle arrived right as we were launching our student workshop series. We ran five or six of them while he was here, and once we saw how well they were landing, we started brainstorming how other institutions might run something similar. We took our student workshop model on the road, presenting to the Tennessee Library Association in 2024, at SEAALL in March 2025, and at the Special Libraries Association annual conference that June. I have talked to many people over the past year who used those materials to build their own workshop series, so the mission worked. His good deeds spread!
What Carries Forward
Much of what Kyle built stays, and that is such a joy for us on the VAILL team. One of the greatest things about the way Kyle worked? He’s a team player, and he created things for our VAILL team, our Vanderbilt home, and the greater legal community — all of which he built and leaves behind for us. Certainly makes our jobs a little easier!
None of that is the reason we are going to miss him, though. Kyle was an easy fit from the day he started. There was no adjustment to a new personality in the room; it was as if he had always been on the team. He was a sounding board and a supportive friend to all of us, and we’ll all miss having him around to talk all things AI, Dolly Parton, and everything in between. The students liked him too, which is not a small thing, ha! And our team meetings at Little Rey’s won’t be the same.
And I think we can all learn a thing or two here. Kyle spent two years developing AI programming within a law school and across the legal community. He is leaving to become an in-house AI attorney at a Fortune 100 company. That move says something about where this work is heading. The skills he built and refined here— evaluating tools honestly, teaching people to use them without overselling them, knowing the difference between a demo and a workflow, and being able to advise on what “good” AI use actually is— are skills companies have started hiring for directly rather than hoping someone picks it up on the side. We expect that to be true for more people in this space over the next few years.
Congratulations, Kyle. Dollar General got someone great.