1. Contract management platforms

Contract management platforms are digital solutions designed to streamline and automate the entire contract lifecycle from creation and review to execution and storage.

These solutions typically standardize contract creation with templates and route contracts to required stakeholders for review. Many top solutions are also AI-enabled nowadays, which fast-tracks reviews by giving automated suggestions. Lastly, it also centralized storage so you are not struggling to find your contracts. 

Top use cases for legal teams:

• Contract drafting
• Contract reviews
• Contract approvals
• Contract storage

2. E-billing and spend-management software

E-billing and spend-management software help legal departments accurately track their spending and forecast future expenses. It comes with modules to track invoices and matters. Further, the legal team can use the consolidated data in the platform to track all their vendors' performance and forecast spend on any new matters.  

Top use cases for legal teams:

• Invoice approval and monitoring
• Matter management
• Vendor management
• Budgeting and forecasting

3. Virtual legal assistants/AI-powered chatbots 

Virtual legal assistants and AI-powered chatbots are software applications that assist legal professionals with research. These tools can scour through case law, legal journals, court documents, and more to pull out the right information required for their documents and case. By using these tools, you can save time spent on creating documents or preparing for any course.

Top use cases for legal teams:

• AI-powered legal research
• Document generation
• Document summarization

1. Decrease time spent on manual legal tasks

77% of legal professionals believe that time spent on manual daily activities keeps them away from working on larger business goals and affects their ability to provide legal services in a timely manner. Legal tech automates these manual tasks to improve efficiency. For instance, Gameskraft saved 10+ hours per week and increased contracting efficiency by 75% by using a contract lifecycle management solution.

2. Helps to manage legal team budget

The average salary of a senior Counsel in the USA is $218,000. It could cost a business USD$817,500 per year for a legal team of 10 if they are wasting three hours a day on manual tasks that could be easily automated. Legal tech helps to get more done with the same team. For instance, the legal team at Headout reduced their contracting workload by 60% by using a contract management solution. With such excellent results, 60% of leaders report plans to accelerate their investments in legal technology as a cost-effective way to manage workloads and budgetary limitations.

3. Reduce manual mistakes in documentation 

Legal tech automates manual tasks, reducing the chances of errors. 41% of legal professionals believe legal tech, particularly AI, reduces the chances of human error. For instance, AI-enabled contract solutions can automatically create documents by pulling the right information and highlighting errors to assist with reviews.

4. Better risk management

AI-enabled contract management solutions can flag complicated terms in agreements to safeguard your business from risks. AI-powered legal search also provides the team with sufficient data to handle matters better. Lastly, legal documents carry sensitive data requiring you to adhere to industry standards such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and more. Legal tech solutions centralize the storage of these documents in one portal that is compliant with industry guidelines.

5. Advanced data analytics and insights

Legal tech centralizes the storage of documents/invoices, which will help you monitor and pull reports. Many legal tech solutions come with their built-in reporting module, which automatically pulls insights that can improve workflows. For instance, e-billing solutions come with automatic vendor performance and forecasting modules. Contract management solutions also have a reporting module that tracks average contract review time, time taken by different teams to review contracts, and more 

1. Define objectives

As a first step, you can identify the routine tasks that are most time-consuming, manual, and prone to errors. Gather input from the entire legal team to identify these pain points.

Some common pain points are:

• Contracts stuck in approval reduce deal velocity
• Manual errors in contracts that increase risks
• Difficulty finding agreements waste time
• Manual legal research consume time

Automating these tasks would be the best bet to improve the team's efficiency.

2. Select the tool

Once you have identified the pain point, you can choose the relevant tool for it. For instance, if your most time-consuming task is legal research, your solution would be virtual legal assistants/AI-powered legal research platforms. But how do you choose which legal assistant?

You can identify the right solution from the market by following the below checklist:

• Can the tool be integrated with your current tech stack?
• Is the tool user-friendly and requires minimal training?
• Does the tool have clear documentation for smooth implementation?
• Does it provide reliable customer support?
• Does it adhere to industry privacy and security standards?
• Is the pricing in your budget?
• Does it have advanced AI features?
• Are there testimonials available that showcase its efficiency?
• Does it track all necessary KPIs in its reporting and analytics module?
• Does it provide any compliance support?

3. Develop an implementation plan

Once you have identified the tool, create a timeline for implementation tasks. Usual tasks include integration, data migration, phased roll-out, testing, training, and more. Keep this plan as detailed as possible with realistic timelines and task owners.

4. Implement and test

After the plan is approved, teams can start executing the tasks and start addressing issues, if any, in this phase. A small set of users can test the tool first, creating a set of guidelines and then rolling it out to the entire team.

5. Evaluate and optimize

Lastly, for a successful implementation, set key professional indicators (KPIs) that ties back to the pain point you identified in Step 1. For instance, if your pain point was contracts stuck in approval, reducing deal velocity, your KPI should be average contract review time. Regularly track this KPI and evaluate if you are using the tool to its full potential till you have this KPI optimized. 

1. Difficulty in integration

One major issue legal teams face that the tool didn't fit in their tech stack, making execution tough. It also made collaboration challenging with data being stored in silos.

Solution: This issue can be easily avoided by checking in-built integrations in advance before subscribing to any tool.

2. Huge learning curve

Another issue is there is often a big learning curve for the legal tech solution that slows down the implementation at the ground level.

Solution: Use an easy-to-use solution that requires minimal training. Also, check if the tool has detailed documentation for team members to go through when required.

3. Potential tool overload

Managing multiple tools can be overwhelming with constant app-switches and data also getting siloed in different platforms.

Solution: Use a consolidated legal tech solution that can solve as many problems as possible in a single platform.

4. Poor support

Not every issue may possibly be discussed in existing documentation of any platform. Once in a while, the team will need to contact the support team for issues. Many users have struggled with poor support of their legal software.

Solution: Check the support team's working hours in advance. A 24/7 support team is ideal if you are a global team. If you need support only in a specific time, then look for maximum overlap between your work hours and support hours

5. Potential security vulnerabilities

Another major dilemma legal teams face is letting an external platform access their sensitive documents, fearing security.

Solution: Use a compliant legal tech solution that adheres to all industry standards for data privacy and security.

1. The global legal tech industry will double in size by 2027

Generative AI is creating strong waves in the legal industry with many companies now looking for AI-enabled solutions. The global legal technology market will double in size because of Generative AI by 2027 and many legal leaders are facing growing pressure to respond.

2. By 2026, AI will generate 25% of first-draft contracts and other legal documents

Companies are gaining more confidence in the Large Language Models (LLM) and Generative AI. More in-house teams are depending on AI-powered contract lifecycle management solutions to create and manage agreements. In fact, studies predict that 25% of first-draft documents will be AI-generated by 2026.

3. Legal analytics is set to hit new highs with AI

With AI integration, legal data analysis tools help to identify risks faster, optimize workflows, and improve strategies. Deloitte found that 75% of legal and regulatory compliance teams expect AI to heavily impact their data management and analysis practices, while 43% believe they can use AI to proactively mitigate legal risks.

4. CLM will be as ubiquitous as ERM and CRM

More and more legal teams are using contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems to improve efficiency. Centralizing contract management, like finance and CRM, reduces costs, manages risk, and improves performance. While there's some upfront investment, CLM ultimately lowers costs, mitigates risks, boosts performance, streamlines workflows, accelerates deal-making, and optimizes how legal teams use their resources.

"Although a CLM solution might seem costly in the early stages, companies should have it in place and build workflows within the tool to process contracts better. By doing so, they can keep legal costs low in the growth stages and close deals faster. Moreover, they will have clear visibility into the contract pipeline and use their legal resources to optimize workflows better for yielding maximum results."

‍~ Igor Poroger, the Director of Legal (EMEA) at Vectra AI
Streamlining Legal Processes: Advice from 7 GCs and Heads of Legal