A deep fear among legal professionals – that is almost never expressed explicitly – is that, ultimately, process automation or the adoption of AI will lead to the loss of their jobs. It’s true: lots of legal jobs become redundant. Especially the smaller, almost immeasurable non-legal ‘jobs’ might disappear.
Removing ‘jobs’ is the very nature of automation and inherent to AI:
- No scan-reading a contract template for removing square brackets of highlighted wording (but answering the related questionnaire).
- No manual searching-saving-storing jobs while creating, negotiating or organising a transaction.
- No scan-reading another party’s first-draft contract for the usual suspects, unacceptable clauses, or any unusual provisions.
- No need for a senior to approve (if historic data support decision making).
- Little need for project management (as tasks are tracked and followed-up upon automatically).
- No hassle in finding a contract, as tooling performs full-text fuzzy search jobs, and all contract files on SharePoint were indexed automatically.
Potential for automating legal ‘jobs’ are manyfold, and the possible gains of automating legal work almost endless. True! And some fear for losing their jobs is also understandable. But have you ever been a part of a winning team? A team that was able to handle 10 times more contracts? A team that reduced their time spent from 3 hours to some 25 minutes? The above image says it all.
The CEO’s skin
Did you ever crawl in the skin of your CEO or CFO? Their main interest with the legal department, as with any part of the organisation, is to make it work better, to gear the legal department with the organisation’s mission and core priorities.
As for every leader, when automation and AI-usage starts to pay off, your CEO’s focus will shift to those parts of the organisation where the greatest potential for further improvements are.
Shine
For example, a CEO, CFO or head of legal will not initiate a re-organisation in a team that optimised their way of working by 720%. It makes no sense to fire employees who have the mindset and a track-record of making the company shine.
Imagine Liverpool FC winning the Champions League and then firing their trainer Arne Slot (can you)? Think of Max Verstappen winning the Formula-1 world championship and then throw out his team of engineers.
Create more coffee time
At Weagree, we have supported many success stories of contract automation and CLM. By supporting, I mean, we have made all efforts to have our customer succeed – by creating a super user-friendly solution. Admitted, no-one will ever witness how a properly organised CLM prevented an unintended contract extension or how a contract was not absent and therefore prevented a dispute.
But we have experienced customers that were able to save 180-325 hours per legal counsel per year – indeed, saving some 16.6% of everyone’s time. We visualised it in the above image.
Many of the actions listed above take almost-negligible time for experienced legal practitioners to complete. Yet, if you make a sport out of it, the gains become enormous. A winner can spend more time at the coffee machine, drinking an espresso or macchiato (whether latte or oat).
16.6% more coffee time
