In the fast-paced world of legal operations, the need for innovative solutions is paramount. This comprehensive guide explores the realms of Legal Design and Visual Law, ushering in a new era in legal documentation and strategy. Tailored for Legal Operations enthusiasts and experts, this guide demystifies the complexities and highlights the transformative power of these progressive approaches
CLOC ReCharge Webinar Series – Cultivating Strong Partnerships Track, sponsored by Integreon
In Legal Operations, we all love a good tech solution – but technology is only as effective as the people and processes within and around it. Many excellent tech solutions fall flat because we need to fully realize end-user adoption at the end of our change management cycle and to strategically seek continued adoption by upholding the usefulness and integrity of the tool and skillsets for the people utilizing it. Managing change for a solution doesn’t stop when implementation is complete; change is a verb and a continual process we must actively participate in. This presentation seeks to provide the audience, with practical tools, best practices and actionable steps, emphasizing that the Legal Operations role is crucial in ensuring end users embrace the tools you introduce within their entire lifespan in an organization.  Â
Deciding to invest in legal technology and picking the right solutions are only pieces of the puzzle. What comes before and after each purchase is what determines whether your implementation will be a long-term success. Â
From justifying initial spend to leadership, driving excitement for a new process among peers, proving ROI, showcasing accomplishments, and driving continuous user adoption, join us for this expert perspective on building a sustainable legal tech stack. We’re bringing together two industry leaders who have learned from years of trial, error, and success in legal technology program development and longevity. Â
After operating off of a homegrown solution for eight years, TD SYNNEX transitioned to Mitratech’s Matter Management and Workflow Automation platform (that now automates 600+ legal contract requests monthly). Meanwhile, after an unsuccessful IT-led program, the legal team at YUM! Brands are rolling out workflows to achieve cross-functional automation and collaboration.Â
Join this webinar and learn firsthand how they have navigated the landscape ofÂ
Contracts are the backbone of all commercial relationships. They help businesses clearly define the parameters of a working relationship to ensure they meet everyone’s expectations.
Even before agreement terms take shape, contracts have a far-reaching impact throughout an organization. They affect functions as diverse as risk management, compliance, procurement, sales, and finance. Contract data defines how those key functions must operate, which becomes even more complex across a company’s contract portfolio.
Contracts are the central nervous system of any business relationship. They define in detail each party’s roles and responsibilities, with the idea that everyone wins in the ways that are important to them. And because contracts have legal, financial, and other business-critical implications, they often have a far-reaching, ongoing impact throughout an organization.
Join the second installment in our regional roundtable series. We will be discussing how your peers are using business process automation and optimization to improve efficiency. Be ready to share tips and discuss challenges, from roadmapping to solutioning.
We will be limiting the number of attendees to promote participation, so please register quickly to secure your spot.
Deborah Haile, Associate Director, Legal Operations at Gilead Sciences, Inc. will be our moderator for this event.
Associated with San Francisco Bay Area
Brought to you by the CLOCÂ Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging CouncilÂ
Fewer in-house legal departments are making law firm diversity information a high priority when deciding to hire outside counsel.  17% in 2023 reported it as a high priority versus 23% in 2022, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute Law Department Operations. In addition, 39% reported in 2023 that their in-house functions had a diversity initiative in place compared to 47% in 2022. This apparent reduction in priority has more to do with a fast-changing and dynamic risk landscape and regulatory framework and less to do with D&I lessening as a priority. Indeed, the importance of D&I as a main source of talent attraction is not going away soon. So, how can legal departments provide ongoing efficiency in the operations of legal functions as the scope of their responsibilities expands, while at the same time continue to drive efficiency in outside counsel D&I metrics and reporting?  What tools are the most useful?  In this session, you will hear from two legal ops professionals on the innovative practices and tools they are using to ensure their D&I initiatives remain a high priority amongst an ever-increasing workload.  Â
If you ask your legal team what one of their biggest challenges is, the phrase “contract management” will undoubtedly come up. Improving the contract management process, increasing efficiency and finding the right legal tech stack is a top priority for legal operation teams year after year. Yet, many organizations still struggle with years of disorganized contracts and outdated processes. In many cases, contracts live in multiple locations and it’s anyone’s guess as to which one is the most recent version.
As a legal ops professional, “contract chaos” may not directly impact your day-to-day, but it’s a huge barrier to your legal team’s productivity. It costs the company money, whether from spending time inefficiently or paying for unnecessary outsourced legal hours. And it creates risks: the risk of no centralized visibility to contract terms and requests, the risk of missed opportunities to accelerate deals or remove unfavorable terms at renewal – just to name a few.
Even if everyone is resigned to using the current system, regardless of these costs and risks, legal operations should never be satisfied to let bad processes go unquestioned.
Another blog about generative AI? Before you tune out, we’re not here to tell you that AI is going to replace your legal team.
The truth is, generative AI has huge potential to transform the way legal teams work, but not because it’ll do real, thoughtful, legal work for them. Instead, generative AI will be the assistant your lawyers always wished they had. A tool that can effortlessly read and summarize large document sets in seconds, or instantly pinpoint parts of a contract that aren’t in line with your company’s playbook. Amplifying each legal team’s capabilities by removing admin work is where generative AI really shines.
While we can’t cover everything in one short article, we’ll touch on three of the ways incorporating generative AI into your contract management process can solve many of the traditional CLM shortfalls.
Even with a CLM in place, managing contracts can still be a complex and time-consuming endeavor. Traditional CLMs, even when they incorporate some degree of AI, often suffer from these common limitations:
As you might guess, traditional CLMs with these limitations might be a step in the right direction but they’re hardly a full solution to your legal team’s needs. Moreover, any tasks performed by, or information gleaned from, this type of system still needs a thorough review by a highly trained (and highly paid) legal professional. In some cases, investing in a traditional CLM can create more work than it relieves, which doesn’t delight your legal team or anyone else around the company who feels the ripple effect of difficult contract management.
Enter generative AI. And forget, for a moment, the publicly available large language models (LLMs) like Google’s Bard or Microsoft’s Bing, which are impressive but not platforms you should trust with the entirety of your company’s contract data.
Instead, we’re talking about generative AI that exists within your CLM platform and only draws from the contracts and documents you provide it. In this way, the AI lives inside a closed environment, known in technical terms as a sandbox.
How is generative AI different?  Â
Generative AI has the potential to provide unprecedented levels of accuracy and speed for anyone looking to unlock the data within hundreds or thousands of documents. With the right data set and prompts, generative AI can perform a wide variety of detailed contract analyzes that traditional approaches cannot.
Unlike traditional methods, generative AI takes a more flexible approach that centers around learning and simulating human-like language capabilities. This means the models don’t need strict templates and standardized workflows, but rather acquire language skills in an unstructured manner, similar to humans. This revolutionary ability allows legal teams to automate more aspects of their document review process than ever before, all without having to manually create or update templates.
Generative AI can also provide invaluable insights into the risk factors that might otherwise be hidden deep within contracts. It does this by quickly summarizing documents, identifying discrepancies, and analyzing risks from a variety of angles.
By leveraging this technology for your legal team’s needs you can reduce costs while improving accuracy and efficiency across multiple areas of your business. And here’s how!
All of this sounds great, but you want to know how generative AI will make a concrete difference in your legal team, sales team, procurement team, or others’ processes. Here are just three of the ways generative AI + CLM, when done correctly, can reduce the burden on your legal team and empower them to serve the entire business better.
1. Quickly summarize contractsÂ
Generative AI can be used to quickly review large numbers of documents and pull out key terms, themes, changes over time, etc. This dramatically reduces the time a highly-trained human needs to spend doing the same. With the right prompt, “Summarize the changes across the master and all amendments,” for example, and the right data set, generative AI can provide an accurate answer that would have taken a person hours of reading to obtain.
2. Instantly analyze riskÂ
When provided with your compliance and playbook requirements (in plain English, no less!) generative AI can identify terms and conditions in your contracts that present risk or are entirely noncompliant. Having these risks pinpointed removes the most time-consuming step and allows your legal team to address the risks in order of priority.
3. Assist in contract authoringÂ
Sure, there are plenty of cases when you need an attorney to draft a custom portion of a contract. But there are many more instances when standard language will do the job, as long as it’s compliant with your best practices, industry standards, and your contract playbook. Generative AI can be used to speed up contract drafting by suggesting language based on past agreements and current business objectives. It can also detect discrepancies between existing contracts and your standards, and alert attorneys of potential risks that arise based on contract language.
No discussion of generative AI for legal teams would be complete without touching on the limitations of this groundbreaking technology.
While it can provide a powerful tool for quickly reviewing and summarizing documents, identifying discrepancies, and analyzing risks, it’s also subject to the same biases as humans, particularly when trained on biased or incorrect information. Additionally, generative AI can suffer from “hallucinations” where it produces seemingly factual information that simply isn’t.
Most of the major pitfalls of using generative AI in the legal context can be mitigated by high quality, clean data on the input side and skilled prompt engineering, along with an expert human’s review, on the output side.
These three capabilities are just scratching the surface of how generative AI can aid legal teams (and, as a result, the rest of the company) work faster, smarter, safer, and for less cost. For a deeper dive into the game-changing ways AI can power a new way of managing contracts, check out The Ultimate GenAI Playbook for Contract Management by Pramata.
An untapped operational advantage
As today’s organizations contend with inflation and the threat of a recession, “efficiency” and “growth” are two buzz words that reverberate across every boardroom.
At the same time, your corporate legal team is shouldering a larger workload than ever before. You are drowning in complexity and need more resources, not less. From increasingly stringent regulatory requirements to inefficient manual processes and demands for reports from across your business, simply keeping up with the day-to-day workload is all that most legal teams can achieve.
But by harnessing the power of technology, you can transform your organization’s entity management from a costly compliance chore to a key growth driver that boosts confidence in regulatory reporting, creates new efficiencies and unlocks new insights for crossfunctional teams.