It’s time to focus your attention on the big picture.
For far too long, the legal department has been viewed as the slowest part of the business. This assumption is true for a number of reasons, but chief among them is that the primary role of the legal department is to balance risks with opportunities. This responsibility often requires hours of analysis of massive amounts of data in order to forecast potential gains and minimise losses. Now that our industry is more aware of what generative artificial intelligence can do, and how it can improve the contract management workflows, tedious routine tasks that took a long time to complete can be completed within minutes. These advancements have major implications for the legal department and its impact on the rest of the organization.
As we begin 2025, three emerging trends point to a future where legal teams will have the insights they need to play an integral role in their organization’s revenue goals. Here’s a look at how these shifts will transform legal work, freeing legal leaders from redundant, time-consuming tasks to focus on big-picture strategies.
1. Modern-day legal teams will be more agile, allowing them to move at the new speed of business
Generative AI has ushered in a new era of contract management strategies. Legal teams can be more productive and agile with the right solutions. This was unimaginable just two years ago. But before legal teams can take advantage of generative AI solutions that are actually useful versus just being cool, business leaders must be more thoughtful about their AI investments and implementations.
It’s imperative businesses understand and lean into effective data grounding efforts to avoid “garbage in, garbage out” scenarios often associated with the large language models powering today’s more popular generative AI platforms. Data grounding is a critical factor in generative AI’s ability to deliver accurate, high-value outputs for contract management programs. Once teams prioritize their data-grounding efforts, tasks which took months to complete will be completed within minutes. Generating first-drafts, writing clauses on the basis of playbook analysis, and searching endlessly for contracts which are often stored in disparate systems are just some of the use cases where generative AI can drive productivity across legal processes and workflows.
Justin Schweisberger is responsible for sales, marketing, and strategic partnerships at Pramata. Pramata is a leading platform for end-to-end contracts management.
2. Contract data will be recognized as a business-critical asset, unlocking unrealized revenue gains and new levels of growth
Contract data is not only the key to unlocking cost-saving opportunities, it is also one of the largest sources of untapped revenue for organizations that haven’t optimized their contract management programs. Contract data can be used to drive massive revenue gains in a variety of ways. From identifying revenue leakage, overspending with vendors, and developing more profitable renewal terms and contract provisions. Unfortunately, most CLM solutions fail to provide valuable insights that can help organizations achieve their most important goals. Effective enterprise-grade contract AI is changing the way legal teams leverage contract data. With full visibility into their contracts–along with tools that can automate complex data analysis–forward-thinking legal teams will be able to realize the organization’s contracts as the business-critical asset they are.
Before legal teams can maximize the value of their contract data, it’s imperative that their contract management solutions come equipped with a contract-AI knowledge engine to avoid the “garbage-in, garbage-out” challenges often associated with generative AI tools. It is also important that CLM software includes an AI-powered repository that enables legal teams to expertly organize their contracts and extract key insights from a centralized–and searchable–database. Another key component of an effective contract management platform is ensuring it is not only intuitive, but accessible to stakeholders outside of the legal department, including sales leaders, finance teams, and the procurement department.
3. Enterprise-grade contract AI will allow legal leaders to achieve outcomes that go far beyond the legal department
The introduction of enterprise-grade contract AI technology makes it possible to extend the value of contract data well beyond the legal department. The right platforms will allow sales, procurement, and finance teams to gain access to previously unattainable contract insights, which will help them achieve their most important goals. Legal teams can use contract data to drive revenue, while procurement teams are able to better manage vendor relationships. The ability to create self service contract management solutions for business leaders outside the legal department will be a key benefit. This includes the CFO and the head of sales. And that’s the real promise of enterprise-grade contract AI: delivering unhindered access to valuable contract data to the people who can activate it and drive measurable revenue growth.
There’s no question that the future of legal work is undergoing massive shifts. Legal leaders are rethinking the way they do business and integrating generative AI into their workflows. Justin Schweisberger is responsible for sales, marketing, and strategic partnerships at Pramata, an end-to-end platform for contract management. In this role, Schweisberger establishes Pramata’s global market position and builds relationships with some of world’s leading brands. The purpose of these columns is to offer practical guidance for attorneys on how to run their practices, provide information about the latest trends in legal technology and how it can help lawyers work more efficiently, and strategies for building a thriving business.
Interested in contributing a column? Send a query to
.
This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal–or the American Bar Association.
