Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming knowledge-based professions, and legal operations are no exception. As legal departments grapple with increasing workloads and tight budgets, AI offers a way to enhance efficiency and effectiveness without the need for additional human resources. 

This blog post explores the implications of AI for legal teams, careers in legal operations, and the essential skills needed to thrive in this evolving landscape. 

What Does AI Mean for Legal Teams? 

Legal teams are increasingly required to do more with less. In-house counsel manages everything from corporate transactions, to litigation, to regulatory compliance, and they regularly interface with teams around the business including sales, procurement, finance, IT, and more. That breadth of scope means that legal teams need not only to manage a high volume of work, but also to switch rapidly between several different areas of expertise on a day-to-day basis. That requires organization, agility, and ready access to crucial business information — in short, impeccable legal operations. 

Despite ever-burgeoning workloads, however, hiring budgets for legal operations remain constrained. In fact, eighty-seven percent of surveyed legal departments in 2020 expected their total number of in-house, full-time employees to stay the same or decrease. This scenario necessitates innovative solutions to scale up operations efficiently. AI is poised to fill this gap by automating routine tasks, enhancing document review processes, and providing data-driven insights that enable teams to operate leanly while managing higher volumes of work. By leveraging AI, legal departments can optimize their resources, allowing human professionals to focus on more complex, value-added activities. 

What Does AI Mean for Careers and Job Skills? 

The integration of AI in legal operations is reshaping the skill sets required for success in the field. Professionals who can work effectively across functional silos and drive collaboration on multidisciplinary projects will be highly prized. These individuals will drive significant value for large organizations by bridging gaps between different departments and enhancing overall operational efficiency. 

To that end, tech-savvy individuals who embrace, leverage, and champion new technologies will thrive. The ability to adapt to and utilize AI tools to augment productivity — and enable co-workers to do so as well — will become a critical competency in the legal operations landscape. 

Getting Ahead in the New World of AI-Powered Jobs 

In a recent survey, 62% of respondents said that the effective use of generative AI will separate successful law firms from unsuccessful firms within the next five years. However, success is not as simple as just picking any AI platform and calling it a day. 

To excel in AI-powered legal operations, professionals must focus on (1) choosing the right technology, and then (2) providing what technology cannot: human intelligence and experience. Choosing the right technology entails understanding what AI can and can’t do, and which platforms offer the capabilities that the team truly needs. The human element includes making connections between different disciplines, understanding nuance and context, and fostering human relationships. 

Legal ops professionals must also recognize and value factual accuracy, ensuring that they’re using AI they can trust and avoiding decisions based solely on AI-generated information, which can sometimes be flawed or misleading when it comes from the wrong source. Furthermore, making value-based judgments about goals, costs, benefits, and strategies will remain a uniquely human responsibility. 

By combining AI capabilities with human expertise, legal ops professionals can navigate the complexities of their roles more effectively. 

Conclusion 

AI is revolutionizing legal operations by enabling teams to manage increasing workloads without expanding their headcount. As AI becomes more integrated into legal workflows, the demand for multidisciplinary, tech-enabled professionals will rise. Those who can provide human intelligence, understand nuance, and make strategic, value-based decisions will lead the way in this new era. Embracing AI while honing these essential skills will be key to thriving in the future of legal operations.

 

As digital transformation continues apace across organizations, contracts are gaining more and more attention as an area crying out for automation and data. One leading technology advisory firm reports significant and continued year-over-year growth in inquiries around contract lifecycle management (CLM) as companies grapple with ongoing market disruptions that impact their contractually defined commercial relationships. 

For legal operations, this focus on contract technology can be a double-edged sword. Legal is heavily involved in contracting (naturally), and, in theory, contract technology should make contract processes faster and easier for law departments and for the benefit of the entire enterprise.  

In practice, however, two common challenges emerge: 
 
In some cases, legal teams get put in the proverbial back seat with contract transformation efforts when other departments take the lead in choosing a solution that works best for their use case—one system for procurement contracts, another for sales, a third for corporate contracts like NDAs. Legal is left jumping between disparate systems for reviews, approvals, template management, etc. 

In other cases, legal teams take the lead on contract transformation in their organizations but focus on what the technology can do for legal, not the rest of the company. Little surprise, this approach leads to solutions gaining little to no adoption from other departments that generate the agreements.  

Both these outcomes point to the unique challenge contracts present when compared to other legal processes: they require input and cooperation from across the enterprise. One report, from World Commerce & Contracting, suggests that 25% of a company’s workforce plays a part in managing contracts. Ostensibly, that means any contract management system should be accessible and enabling to a quarter of a business. No small feat! 

The good news is that it can be done. The better news is that legal operations professionals are in the best position to make it happen.  

In one of my favorite examples, the legal operations department at a major technology company worked with its procurement and IT teams to stand up a contracting system that 220,000 employees could access to self-service sourcing contracts. These users are generating 150,000 SOWs a year with little to no help needed from expensive legal resources.  

Key to this successful deployment is the teamwork shown by the legal operations team. They engaged outside stakeholders early and often, understanding what their users need and how they can support them. To borrow a phrase from John F. Kennedy, they asked not what CLM could do for legal, but what legal could use CLM to do for the enterprise. 

This enterprise focus goes right to the heart of CLOC’s description of the desired state for technology:  Create a clear technology vision that spans all of the needs of your organization” (emphasis mine). 

From this and other success stories, three important considerations emerge for legal operations teams that want to drive successful contract transformation efforts across the enterprise: 

1. Listen & Learn: A successful team should work to understand what matters to other departments. Each division will have its own frustrations with contract processes, will see different risks, and will have a wide array of opportunities. A successful blueprint depends on accurate information, which in turn comes from a thorough survey of needs and requirements. 
    

2. Integrate: Integration is the key to widespread adoption. It’s much easier for departments and teams to adopt new solutions when the technology is presented in tools they already use. For legal, this might mean Microsoft Word; for procurement departments, it might be Ariba; for sales teams, Salesforce. Notably, integrations are often overlooked in CLM projects – a recently survey of hundreds of legal operations professionals found that only 1/3 had integrated their CLM into other systems. 
    

3. Align on KPIs: Nothing builds momentum in digital transformation like showing improvements in the areas that matter most. When the team knows which KPIs to measure first, analyzing data can provide definitive results. For example, procurement might say their biggest pain point is the delay in getting suppliers under contract. If so, have the team measure how contract turnaround time improves. When stakeholders can see the immediate benefits of digital transformation, they become CLM champions.  

Contracts don’t stay inside the four walls of the legal department, and neither can any digital transformation effort aimed at gaining value and efficiencies from these critical documents. With the right cross-functional approach, legal operations can get in the driver’s seat for a consequential digital transformation project that will pay significant dividends for the entire organization. 

To learn more about your legal operations peers are addressing the challenges and opportunities facing them today, access this free copy of the 15^th annual LDO Survey. 

The role of legal operations is having its well-deserved moment in the spotlight. There are wide-ranging benefits of adding this team of professional efficiency drivers to your legal team. Publishing firm Legal 500 also pushes General Counsels (GCs) to “unbundle internally” – and establish a legal operations department to improve planning, technology, communication, and financial management – everything beyond giving legal advice.

The advantages are clear, but it’s challenging to go from creating a legal ops team to building one that runs like a well-oiled machine. In this blog, we’ll cover principles that will transform your legal ops team. Let’s dive in!

Build bridges within your business with legal ops.

Communication gaps erode performance. Enterprises often experience these in two areas: financial reporting and sales cycles. But a well-tuned legal ops function bridges these divides.

Financial Reporting

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) guides legal operations professionals to pursue activities that maximize resources through sound financial management. Often, companies need more visibility and predictability in their budgeting and forecasting. This leads to material cash impacts, including shortfalls and a lack of economic context when making investment decisions.

Given its proximity to deals and contracts, legal ops can share critical reporting that boosts finance team effectiveness. Opportunity areas include: 

• Streamlining invoice review
• Allocating legal costs to business areas
• Deriving spend insights from vendor contracts
• Supporting budget development with centralized reporting

Legal ops teams have become an indispensable part of budgeting and financial planning by supporting activities like these.  

Sales Cycle

When legal and sales fall out of sync, the deal pace slows. To avoid this, legal ops must pinpoint problem areas. This often means eliminating communication gaps by centralizing and integrating both teams’ data and systems.

Practically, this should include creating processes that move contract drafting and management workflows out of the inbox. LinkSquares, for example, built a Salesforce CRM integration within its contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform. This becomes a low-hanging fruit opportunity for many to reduce the email clutter that’s compounding poor communication. Reps benefit from automated contract status updates, and managers sharpen their ability to forecast, assess time-to-close, and predict revenues.

To support sales (or any critical business function), legal ops must also understand what their colleagues need and expect. This doesn’t mean becoming an order taker. Spend time defining common sales cycle disruptors and identifying process risks. Talk to key stakeholders; come up with step-by-step procedures and workflows to improve ownership, clarity, and accountability.

When teams don’t discuss these, sales process confusion turns to frustration. As one legal leader told us, “Communication missteps are rare when everyone knows who is doing what by when.” Once exposed, legal ops must rebuild the processes that once slowed down deals. Consider deploying tools to speed up contract creation by allowing sales to draft or request agreements directly from their CRM. Additionally, consider pre-approved terms or contract language that sales or customer success teams can use without interacting with legal.

Explore self-service reporting as well. Legal ops may streamline communications by adopting software to give business users access to custom contract reporting. For example: Does the revenue ops team need to pull reports on how many contracts renew this quarter or understand how many clients are headquartered in London?

Automate it  – eliminate back-and-forth emails that paint the picture of other teams waiting on legal to comb through contracts. Ready now? Download this guide today.

 

The rapid growth of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to fuel seismic changes throughout every aspect of the business world. A quick glance at recent headlines gives a good sense of just how the expanding power of AI-spawned text, images, and media is reverberating: 

• Google added the power of Generative AI to its search engine, allowing users to receive AI-generated summaries to select queries. 

• IBM is launching a new “WatsonX” studio for organizations to create their own generative AI workflows. 
• A Goldman Sachs survey forecast “significant disruption” to labor worldwide from Generative AI — potentially affecting up to 300 million jobs. 

The legal industry will be in the middle of the Generative AI revolution. But what will that transformation look like for the legal world — and how can the industry best take advantage of its promises and potential?  

Three areas of transformation 

These three legal areas will see meaningful opportunities for value from generative AI:  

• SPEND MANAGEMENT. Generated AI can also boost departments’ ability to make sense of their tens of thousands of lines of invoice data by delivering insights into value, helping departments understand exactly what they are paying for. These quick, accessible insights are a powerful way to stop the attorney habit of “rubber-stamping” invoices and address capacity concerns for busy departments. It also increases the quality and speed of invoice review, flagging patterns that can violate billing guidelines (especially for lengthy, complex invoices).  
   
  Additionally, generative AI can assist with vendor management — particularly tough conversations around rate, value and performance. When backed by detailed, insightful data, it is easier to have productive, emotion-free, and surprise-free conversations. 
   
  EXAMPLE: Invoice summarization. Onit integration with ChatGPT provides a quick, insightful summary of a contract’s tasks to analyze overall value – allowing users to glimpse into the hours spent per task, the work done by specific timekeepers, and much more.  
   
• CONTRACTING. With Generative AI’s ability to generate content such as summaries and redlines, Contracting is a natural place where the technology will have significant impact. In fact, contracting is one area where we see more mainstream adoption of AI — for example, most of Onit’s CLM customers use AI in contracting. Fueling this growth? The improvement in legal comprehension by Generative AI; for example, GPT4 passed the bar exam, scoring in the top 90^th percentile on one 2023 tryout.   
   
  These advancements mean the industry can use AI as a co-pilot to run contract playbooks. AI serves as a powerful tool to help reduce some of the repetitive manual work plaguing this part of the process and improve consistency.    
   
  What about post-signature? In an era of constant mergers and acquisitions, regulation and compliance demands, companies often find themselves with questions about the contracts in their repository. AI-driven analysis gives a valuable look into these contracts and their clause libraries, allowing the new company to quickly identify risks and remediate them.  
   
  EXAMPLE: Contract analysis. Onit’s AI Co-Pilot sits alongside you as you review your contract. You can ask it to spot issues, suggest redlining, compare against your template language and flag deviations from your standards. 
   
• LEGAL REQUESTS. This impact is one our CGI panel and audience were extremely excited about; sometimes, the most beneficial use of AI is to remove manual work (like form filling), remove friction and encourage the adoption of our tools and processes. AI technology can help to kick off the workflow with minimal user intervention, automating legal request creation, determining routing priorities, and establishing tracking — removing significant administrative tasks for attorneys. It can also assist as the “first response,” automating common business requests before they go to Legal.  
   
  EXAMPLE: Creating a legal request. Onit’s AI integration can read an email chain and automatically generate a legal request.    

This is what our audience at CGI 2023 said when we asked them about the impact of Generative AI. Do you agree with their thoughts? 

Next steps for Legal: Three things to remember 

As Legal takes its next steps into the AI world, it’s a good idea to have these general principles in mind: 

• Keep on top of technology. Designate some time for yourself or ask a team to keep up with the possibilities and enhancements of Generative AI. In a world where rapid advancements happen weekly (if not daily), education and knowledge are king.  
• Address the fear of the unknown. The disruptive effects of new technology can be intimidating for many. Don’t rush or push anyone into this new world; encourage them to learn and engage with the space, focus on opportunities and use carefully tested and validated tools.   

We, the legal operators, love working with you, GCs, and we are impressed every day by how quickly you get to the heart of complicated problems that are presented to you from across the company regularly and frequently. We admire you for mastering the art of building up your arguments to present compelling cases. And we experience you to be modest, humble, and humorous. 

Thank you for offering us a seat at the legal leadership table and for thoughtfully, intelligently, and supportively sponsoring our initiatives to reimagine the delivery of legal services. We have done well together and came far. Amongst other things, we figured out outside counsel collaboration, eDiscovery, contract automation, and litigation management. We have also made considerable progress in enticing our colleagues – the legal function – to move from consultation to collaboration, which has led to more tangible results and given greater purpose to our lawyers. 

As we have increased the functional maturity of legal teams, we are now ready to address the fact that not every piece of legal work requires tailored attention and a perfect solution. In fact, half of the work that we do should be looked at from a perspective of operational excellence to help our business partners obtain faster, more consistent, and simpler legal solutions. We are convinced that this is a logical next step, and in pockets, for example in contracting, we are well on the way to doing this already – it is about harmonizing, simplifying, and automating these services. The questions that we need to address are: 

“How do we lead a legal function that will cover workstyles that range from providing a commodity service to the extraordinarily complex and bespoke nature of developing a litigation or acquisition strategy?” 

“How do we do justice to our people that want and need to be developed on these extreme ends of the spectrum?” 

 As always we come prepared with three archetypical options: 

• Focus on core legal activities and delegate everything else to business partners 
• Split the legal function and have an independent legal solutions team manage the day-to-day operational activities 
• Broaden the legal leadership approach to accommodate both groups, those that work to support the day-to-day business and those that take care of the extraordinary matters that companies face a couple of times a year. 

 All options will lead to spectacular outcomes, happy business partners, and satisfied and engaged legal professionals on both ends of the complexity spectrum. 

Author: Maurus Schreyvogel, Chief Legal Innovation Officer at Novartis International AG.

We all know what legal ops is by now. There is sales ops, there is marketing ops, so of course, we deserve our own ops team, too. Legal ops is the engine that modernizes the legal department – with the right support, processes, and tech. They get praise from their colleagues for managing projects, taking care of the budget, managing hiring processes, securing sophisticated tech, and more. 

And rightly so.  

But what is their purpose? What is the tangible, emotional reason for pushing the needle in this often-old-fashioned game?

Having seen legal operations around the world being really impactful, I have a proposition: Legal ops make colleagues outside of the legal department fall in love with legal. Yes, love! Why? Stay with me here.  

People camp outside an Apple store, not because they get something for free – but because they are fans, not just customers. CEOs may love their sales teams. The sales teams may love their SDRs. But when was the last time you heard a sales manager say, “I can’t wait to meet with the legal department on this!” Never, right?  

Folks need us, but do they love us? Sure, we are often seen as the bottleneck preventing the business from getting things done quickly, but that is for a good reason. Review takes time. Decisions take research. Drafting is complex.  

So how do we make legal more loveable?  

Effective legal operations managers help the legal team to catch up to the speed of the business and deliver guidance more efficiently — how, when, and where it’s needed — delighting internal clients. 

In that way, legal operations is the Cupid of the legal department, helping the entire legal team to feel the love from the rest of the business. And while love is not necessarily a KPI that any legal ops managers are concerned with, a better reputation with the business leads to tangible benefits like better engagement with the legal department, better alignment with business priorities, and therefore reduced legal risk for all involved. 

So, with that in mind, let’s look at how legal operations can help the legal department feel the love from the rest of the business. 

What is legal operations to general counsel?

Let’s define the relationship between legal ops and general counsel. Legal operations has a job to improve the legal department from within, and then improve its partnership with other departments across the business. 

Traditionally, general counsel has worked as a consultant, advising the CEO and top management on all strategic matters. But the role of the modern GC has expanded.  

Today, general counsel run big units, which are tasked with servicing the entire business. They now have a two-fold role: To continue being a strategic partner and to start being an efficient legal service center. And more importantly – make these two parts work in sync.  

This is no easy task and in fact, only 52% of general counsel say that their day-to-day department work is aligned with the broader business strategy (EY Law Survey 2021). And the rest are caught up in servicing tasks (2022 In-House Legal Technology and Automation Report by the Lawyer and BRYTER).  

So how can these two parts of GC’s role be aligned and how can legal ops help? The answer is in 2 of the CLOC Core 12 functions of legal ops: Technology and Service Delivery Models.  

Scaling legal services with technology

Just like any other business area in the organization, legal needs to scale — to deliver more guidance to more business users, without sacrificing the quality of that guidance.

In the context of legal, and especially this new servicing nature of in-house counsel, there are tasks such as NDAs, employment contracts, and policy questions that will grow as the company grows. These are business-essential, but without legal ops, these tasks need to be done one by one. But as the volume grows, the one-by-one approach becomes inefficient and laborious. 

So, the role of legal ops is to bring in modern technology and digital approaches — like legal workflow automation — and to aid in the adoption of those approaches within legal. That way, they help the department to scale successfully and smoothly — and internal clients get their requests answered more quickly, and in a scalable, affordable, and low-risk way.  

When legal works quickly, the rest of the business notices — because everyone works more quickly. Removing legal as a bottleneck to other business workflows is one of the best ways legal ops can improve the reputation of the department across the business. 

Improving service delivery models by going digital

Making legal services faster will surely lead to the department being more well-liked by others. But to go from like to love, you must improve how those services are delivered. 

Let’s look at the current service delivery experience for most legal teams, from the perspective of a user in a different department: 

1. The user realizes there is a legal issue at play on their own (this is a lucky situation). 
2. The user contacts someone in the legal department. 
3. They might have contacted the wrong person, so they are manually routed to the right specialist on the legal team. 
4. The user is expecting a clear, quick answer, but often gets “It depends…” and so begins the longest step, the back and forth of clarifying questions and research. 
5. Finally, after days or even weeks, the user is provided with an answer and can proceed with their project. 

 
Of course, this process is motivated by diligence and responsibility on the part of the legal team. There is rarely a quick and clear answer to a legal question, but there are ways to scale knowledge so that similar, repetitive issues don’t have to be solved on a case-by-case basis.  

Now let’s look at a digitized service delivery experience, with legal workflow automation in play: 

1. The user takes an action on a native environment – like Salesforce, MS Teams, or SharePoint — that triggers an automated notification that a legal issue may be at play. 
2. A legal intake tool pops up in that same environment, where the user is asked clarifying questions based on conditional logic pre-defined by the legal team. 
3. Depending on the nature of the request, as these questions are answered, a risk score is automatically calculated, a contract is generated, or guidance is provided. 
4. In cases where manual intervention is needed, the case is escalated and delivered directly to the right legal expert, with all the contextual information needed to proceed. 
5. The entire interaction is automatically documented and stored in a way that can be easily accessed by the legal team. 

A modern legal service delivery model provides guidance where internal clients want it (their current native environments, including mobile devices), when they want it (on-demand), and how they want it (digitally). 

The love starts from within legal 

Sourcing love for the legal team is simple when it’s approached in the right way. It’s about giving the business what they need quickly, easily, and without tons of back-and-forth.  

When legal teams are relieved of manual work and repetitive tasks, and equipped with the right tools, they’re able to do the strategic work they went to law school for. They’re happier and empowered to be more of a strategic partner to their colleagues in other departments, rather than a barrier to fast wins.  

---

Author: Michael Grupp, CEO of BRYTER 
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-grupp/ 

 

In recent years, environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives have become strategic imperatives for companies as they seek to build trust with employees, partners, and customers. ESG builds brand loyalty, gives a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and attracts and retains talent within an organization. A study by Unilever found that a third of all global consumers choose to buy from brands because of their ESG commitments. Accordingly, across enterprises, all departments are exploring how to best match their respective programs to support ESG initiatives. 

The legal department is often associated with enterprise-wide ESG discussions on account of the General Counsel’s role in providing advice and guidance regarding these efforts. However, beyond providing ESG legal and regulatory counsel to the enterprise, GCs must also consider how the legal department can adopt practices that align with these ESG goals. More and more GCs are turning to their Legal Department Operations practitioners (LDOs), who will play a critical role in operationalizing ESG initiatives within the Legal department. 

In a recent conversation I hosted with a diverse group of legal operations leaders, it was clear that LDOs are already putting a lot of thought into how the legal department can build programs to align themselves with these ESG initiatives. Here are just a few ideas that LDOs might consider deploying within their own departments that surfaced in that earlier conversation: 

Environmental 

While each industry’s operations carry different environmental impacts, every company (and legal department) would do well to consider how they can make their operations greener.  

Reducing waste and consumption are obvious first steps. Some LDOs have implemented some easy wins like policies that ban disposable coffee cups or issuing reusable water bottles to all legal department employees to reduce reliance on single use plastic bottles.  

Other departments are going paperless, which is especially impactful when you consider that approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away each year in the United States. Accordingly, many LDOs are reviewing manual, paper-based processes and moving to digital contract management. When contracts are managed digitally, it means no more printing out 70-page contracts to do redlines or to gather wet signatures. It’s staggering how much paper can be saved thanks to a digital document workflow.  

In addition to investigating the impact of going paperless, LDOs are looking at the environmental impact of legal department travel. The pandemic has proven that many of the meetings we thought had to happen in person—like in-person negotiations of a contract–can in fact be done virtually. LDOs should consider whether they can continue some of these practices post-pandemic—not to prevent the spread of COVID, but to keep carbon out of the atmosphere.  

Finally, legal teams are looking beyond contract processes and looking at the substance within the contracts. As LDOs help build templates and make them accessible to the legal department, they might consider creating and deploying standard contract clauses and contract playbooks that address environmental sustainability. Making such clauses available is a unique way for legal departments to contribute to an enterprise’s environmental goals. 

Social 

The “S” in ESG asks companies to think holistically about all their stakeholders—employees, suppliers, customers, shareholders, and the communities that companies work in—and explore how the company might help close the opportunity gap that has historically existed in these populations.  

To be part of the solution, LDOs should consider the legal department’s hiring practices. Reversing historical bias in hiring within the legal department is one way an LDO can make a meaningful contribution to its organization’s social goals. The CLOC competency model identifies Training & Development as a core skill; LDOs can leverage this competency to create professional development opportunities around unconscious bias training for all members of the legal department. This review of hiring practices should extend to all roles in the legal department, from in-house counsel, allied legal professionals and members of the legal department operations team.  

Alignment with these social goals can also come from how legal teams hire outside counsel. Firm & Vendor Management (also a CLOC Core 12 competency) can provide guidance as the legal department engages and hires law firms with track records of diverse hiring and promotion.  

Governance 

Finally, LDOs can play a big role in ensuring the legal team and the company as a whole are operating legally and ethically.  

Top governance concerns for today’s enterprises include issues around bribery, money laundering, cyber-security, and data privacy. While GCs will play a central role in setting the company’s direction around these laws and regulations, LDOs can assist on this front by identifying technology available to the legal department to enable appropriate governance and compliance. 

For instance, LDOs can make sure that all governance policies are easily accessible in a single, shared location (like SharePoint) and simple to read and understand. Transparency and accessibility are key to good governance; accordingly, LDOs can champion the avoidance of legalese and search out opportunities to more clearly explain the rules—so people can follow them. 

LDOs can take a more ambitious step by identifying technology that can assist in an audit of third-party agreements to ensure partners are obliged to follow company guidance on questions of governance. Contract management software can assist in centralizing all contract data in a single location, and AI trained to detect obligation language can automate discovery to turn up gaps in compliance. With past contracts analyzed, LDOs can then turn their attention to future contracts by setting up rules to ensure all relevant regulatory clauses—from privacy to anti-corruption and beyond—are appropriately included in every executed contract. 

Conclusion 

Legal is a critical voice in the organization urging management to look beyond quarterly earnings to understand how a company’s behavior impacts its long-term viability and reputation. With the help of LDOs, legal departments can help operationalize these enterprise-wide ESG initiatives through new programs and technology. This is a golden opportunity for legal teams, and especially LDOs, to step up and lead like the world depends on it. 

A survey of this year’s digital trends in over 800 global legal teams.

Organizations all over the globe rely on legal resources to manage a majority of contracting responsibilities. To keep up with the demand, in-house legal teams are looking for innovations that can improve today’s contracting workflows with an eye toward interoperability and automation. As the speed of business and the need for functional remote work increased in 2020, it became even more important to solve modern agreement problems in a way that set the stage for sustained, scalable digital transformation.

To study the way modern, in-house legal teams operate, DocuSign conducted a survey of more than 800 global corporate legal professionals, focusing on their contracting responsibilities and the tools they use to manage their work. This report summarizes the research, highlighting key trends in the way legal teams prepare and manage contracts today. You’ll also see predictions about the future of contract automation and details of the robust, interconnected contracting processes that legal professionals are central to building and implementing.

It’s 2021, and AI is ready. Are you using it?

The last two years have been a doozy with an unprecedented curveball, within a tornado, within a hurricane for businesses. Survival depended on adapting to the new norms COVID presented, supply chain disruptions, regulatory changes (and then invalidations), and customers’ changing expectations. 

What’s in store for 2022? 2023? 2030? I have no idea, but as a co-founder and EVP of Evisort I’m going to prepare my business and team to be as agile and streamlined as possible, so we have the best chance of tackling any challenge that comes our way.  

Intelligence and adaptability are critical. Businesses will either be left behind by digital transformation or embrace it to keep their competitive advantage.

Business intelligence is critical to adaptability. Unfortunately, many businesses have a massive intelligence blind spot – their existing contracts. Existing contracts are the most important intelligence source in a business – contracts are data and data is the lifeline of a business.

The blind spot is getting bigger and feeding a long-term problem: when companies digitize their Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) processes for generating new contracts they replicate their existing workflows without fundamentally improving them. This means sub-standard terms, pricing, and other trends get replicated in every single new contract. Pouring salt in the wound, businesses waste time and money negotiating the same clauses over and over because they didn’t analyze their historical contracts and learn from past negotiations. 

Change is here and it’s due time that Legal, Legal Ops, and any team that works with contracts demand more from contract management technology.

Contracts are data. And because it’s 2021, your company has either started or has already transformed most of the business to be digital and data-driven. 

Except. For. Contracts. 

In-house legal departments have historically been viewed as a cost center and legal and contract management tech have lagged behind software for profit centers like sales or product. 

Not. Any. More.

Legal and Legal Ops should expect to survive and thrive on the data buried in their contracts – instead of resorting to one-off anecdotes. Contracting teams should have access to analytics and insights in real-time. It should be as simple as uploading contracts to the cloud and using out-of-the-box dashboards that instantly break down your contract components and allow you to filter and drill down into vital information business leaders need, such as: what percentage of our contracts have a termination for convenience and when do they renew? Which of our contracts have non-standard negotiated language we should be aware of? Can we put their logo on our website?

Even more importantly you should be able to easily show the value added by teams drafting and reviewing contracts by automatically measuring and reporting on backlog trends, aging contract drafts, and transaction cycle times.

We need a new standard. That standard is Contract Intelligence.

For too long, AI has been a buzzword in legal tech – or any tech company for that matter. You’d be fired from marketing at a contract management software company if it wasn’t on your website. Vendors are vague and oversell clients who buy platforms only to find that they had to train AI algorithms themselves with frustratingly low levels of success.

AI has not been well defined in this industry for a decade, so let me be very clear.

In 2021 you should be able to upload any document to your contract management system and automatically track clauses, dates, fields, and metadata that can be easily searched and visualized in seconds – without lifting a finger. Furthermore, you should be able to access and analyze all your contracts and data – be it third-party paper or terms unique to your business allowing you to optimize future negotiations for efficient execution – learning and improving from the data-point derived wisdom in your historical documents.

We all need to start demanding Contract Intelligence from our legal tech vendors. It has three critical capabilities:

• Intelligent Contract Lifecycle Management – streamlined, data-driven deal-making tools and workflow processes that make contract request, generation, redlining, and approval workflows transparent, efficient, and optimized for execution    
• AI-based Contract Analytics – answers to your most important contract questions and ability to visualize and report on vital contract info and key performance metrics without manual data entry, data migration, or IT involvement    
• Central and Secure Contract Repository – a single source of truth for all contracts that works with your existing systems, without migration or IT involvement

Contract Intelligence enables businesses to learn from the past to improve the future. Legal, Legal Ops, Sales, Procurement, Finance, and IT teams can now instantly turn contracts into searchable data, answer any question about existing contracts, and optimize new agreements for negotiation and execution so you can make better, faster, less risky deals.

This isn’t pie in the sky thinking.      

Businesses are transforming their contracting with AI today. When COVID-19 hit, NetApp, a provider of data management and solutions for the cloud, was challenged with hardware and supply bottlenecks. To respond to these unforeseen challenges, NetApp quickly needed to understand which customers would accept partial shipments and what recourse it had with key suppliers across most of its product and service lines across the globe. Agreements weren’t historically tagged with “partial delivery” terms and there were tens of thousands of contracts. Fortunately, NetApp transformed their contracting processes with AI and was able to search across all agreements to quickly locate specific provisions, enabling      them to invoice for partial shipments while maintaining customer satisfaction. Within a week, NetApp was able to run a search on partial shipments across their entire contract repository—cutting 24,000 contracts down to 600, with 90 different variations of partial shipment provisions.    

Okay, but what about creating and optimizing new contracts?       

McKinsey estimates that AI technologies could potentially deliver up to $1 trillion of additional value      annually for banks.^[1] Bank of New York Mellon, the bank of banks, uses AI to review new custodial agreements based on their internal rules, guidelines, and processes. They then use AI technology to automatically create customized initial contracts and digitally coordinate with the necessary internal stakeholders for approval of special terms. BNY Mellon then takes it to another level and uses AI to automatically flag non-standard language and alert the necessary legal team members to automate the decision-making process, allowing attorneys to focus on more strategic tasks. 

Now is the time to transform and gain a competitive advantage

Law is changing, capabilities are available today that no one could fathom even five years ago. Today it’s exciting to use these tools, but tomorrow, it will be negligent not to. You need to go beyond digitizing your contracts and processes, you need to datatize them.

---

^[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/ai-bank-of-the-future-can-banks-meet-the-ai-challenge#

Advice on building an organization that can adapt to new challenges

Two popular sayings in the legal world are 1) people, process, technology, and data are what make a firm unique, and 2) change is constant. So how do those two elements work together? How can you ensure that you have the right people, processes, technology, and data for today’s constantly changing world?

Shearman & Sterling, a 150-year-old law firm, recently asked themselves this question as they undertook a massive data analytics project, as shared in a recent Ask the Experts session for CLOC. The firm had one billion documents, only 4% of which were in their document management system (DMS), that they needed to quickly get into ship shape to meet new compliance standards. By the end of the 18-month project, not only were all documents in an easily searchable cloud repository, but the firm was also able to roll out features that are beneficial to the client like partner dashboards, more accurate forecasting, and revenue models for value-based pricing.

Here’s a look at their pillars of people, process, technology, and data, that empowered their success as a data-driven firm.

People

“The people aspect cannot be underestimated,” said Meredith Williams-Range, Chief Knowledge and Client Value Officer at Shearman & Sterling. “You have to bring your people along in your [change] journey. Your processes won’t matter. People are your culture and culture will trump your strategy any day of the week.” In the Shearman & Sterling’s case, that meant truly making the initiative firm-wide, as opposed to the responsibility of a certain team, with top-down support from the C-level executives.

Part of the success of the people aspect can be attributed to hiring and involving the right people. Lawrence Baxter, Shearman & Sterling’s Chief Technology Officer, touts the strategy of balancing IQ, EQ, and AQ — that is, intelligence, emotional intelligence, and adaptability — in new hires. (A former marketing executive, he has seen his share of companies go under because they are unable to adapt). He also likes to create teams with equal proportions of, 1) veterans with strong institutional knowledge, 2) tenured employees who are willing to learn new skills, and 3) newer employees, especially those from other industries, who can bring in fresh new ideas.

The success of the project also depended on a fundamental understanding that this effort was not about replacing people with machines. As Williams-Range explained, “It’s simply about adapting the processes that we have and enhancing those processes because the amount of information and the amount of data coming at us as lawyers is growing each day. The technology holds the hand of the lawyer.”

Process

In terms of process, Williams-Range believes there’s no one right place to start — the important thing is to simply start. For Shearman & Sterling, the beginning point was understanding clients and regulations at a global scale. Baxter also recommended asking clients what’s working and what isn’t, and using those answers to drive internal change, since what the client wants carries weight. Of course, unforeseen circumstances can also drive change — Baxter said he has seen years of innovation in the past few months.

The team agreed there are no shortcuts when it comes to process improvement. As Glenn LaForce, Global Director of Knowledge & Research at Shearman & Sterling put it, “You can’t shortchange the pre-work that goes into getting to what we call the sexy stuff, all the cool analytics projects. You have to go through, you have to look at your data and be sure it’s clean and in order, make sure you have the right governance behind it and make sure you have the right policies behind it, and that takes time.”

A whole-firm initiative also meant involving the whole firm. The company created a multidisciplinary data steering committee to get an understanding of how each part of the organization was using data and the downstream effects of making any changes. How will a change to a process in HR affect the DMS in eDiscovery? How should workflows be adjusted for the unique needs of finance and the research team? How do you ensure there’s an audit trail?

For Jeff Saper, Global Director, Enterprise Architecture & Delivery Services at Shearman & Sterling, a lot of the process work comes down to reducing complexity. “We create complex environments and at the end of the day, they need to be simplified,” he said. However, this process of simplifying and streamlining cannot compromise compliance, regulatory processes, or confidence in your work.

Saper and LaForce also stressed that failure is an important part of the process and should not be viewed as a negative — if it happens within a development environment. Finding processes that do not deliver value is just as important as finding ones that do. The important thing, they agree, is learning how to adapt and move forward.

Technology and Data

Again, when evaluating which technology to use, the question ultimately comes back to what benefit will the client receive. For example, Shearman & Sterling decided to move their DMS to the cloud. However, as Saper pointed out, “It’s not about cloud. It’s the agility of what we can do to make things work faster or leaner and hopefully have a better return for our firm.” People wanted to be able to access data anywhere, on any device — a desire that was certainly fast-tracked by the COVID-19 pandemic — and the cloud enabled that.

Similarly, the firm found success in using established technology in new and different ways. For example, the firm used DISCO eDiscovery to sort through and classify emails. Using the platform’s artificial intelligence capabilities, the team was able to classify some 30 million emails in 12 days.

The team developed a clear strategy around who they would partner with to find the right technology. “We’re never going to be a firm that builds technology,” said Williams-Range. “We have talented lawyers and that’s our sweet spot, but we need to provide the right technology and the right system to our people to be as efficient as possible to deliver the best value to our clients. What we do is we look for those partnerships that are going to really work with us.” 

As someone who spent 16 years on the technology vendor side and has seen a lot of finger-pointing, LaForce emphasized the importance of looking for partners as invested in the success of the project as the internal team is, who have governance procedures and skin in the game. “Otherwise, they’re just selling us a product,” he said.

Baxter also noted that the legal landscape has become complicated. A service provider you are in a joint partnership with on one proposal could be a competitor pitching against you in another matter. Cultivating a friendly relationship throughout these complicated dynamics is an art form that will serve law firms well.

Parting Words of Advice

Ultimately, the work of digital transformation is never done, but with the right people, processes, technology, and data in place, the Shearman & Sterling team feel confident they can tackle new challenges that come their way. Their advice to others looking to make the leap? “Just start somewhere,” said Williams-Range. “It can be overwhelming, but just start.”

“Change is not the devil,” added Saper. “It’s ok to continue on a journey as long as you do it safely and securely within compliance. We’re in a different world and law firms have to adjust to it.”