How AI Enables Legal Teams to Adapt in a Rapidly Changing World 

Between global economic, political, and social unrest, data privacy concerns, regulatory changes, and even the effects of climate change, the world is moving at a dizzying pace — and legal departments are hard-pressed to keep up. The secret to continued success? The rapid insights provided by AI-powered solutions.

Shepherding a legal department has always been challenging; the current business world presents more headaches for Legal than ever. Here are just a few of the things that can keep Legal practitioners up at night:

• The continuing effects of the global pandemic forcing constant contractual monitoring, revisions, and examination to stay in compliance.
• A new global focus on privacy concerns, bringing in a host of new rules and guidelines — differing across countries and regions.
• Continued social and political unrest (along with the effects of climate change), causing disruptions to overseas vendors, supply chains, and more.
• Ever-changing, constantly updated regulatory revisions at a wide variety of levels, requiring consistent, sharp vigilance.

Any one of these elements would be cause for massive concern. When combined, they create a perfect storm of factors that could easily overwhelm a legal department — a storm that does not look like it will subside anytime soon.

Another complicating factor? The sheer volume of contracts and data can also be overwhelming. For example, the average Fortune 1000 company has anywhere from 20,000-40,000 active contracts at any one time (per the US National Association of Purchasing Managers). For large national banks dealing with the effects of the Libor transition, a calculation of 20,000 negotiation processes at a conservative six hours apiece equals around 17,000 days (about 46 and a half years) of project time and a staggering £15-20 million in costs.

The Power of AI in Contract Management

How can Legal keep up with this rapid change that the fast-moving modern world demands? A Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system backed with the power of AI is the key to keeping up with the necessities of today’s speed-of-light business environment. CLM augmented by AI delivers the accessibility, flexibility, adaptability, and accessibility organizations need to thrive.

This combination enables users to:

• Quickly track down those critical documents that have risk for the organization and require urgent attention, allowing for timely response.
• Reduce overall risk by improving the accuracy of contract review and cutting down on the chance of human reviewers overlooking critical information.
• Provide automated redlining, commenting, and critical guidance to reviewers on where to redraft, repaper, and/or renegotiate, speeding up overall work.
• Make large volumes of documents much less intimidating with AI’s immense scalability features, allowing for the review of thousands of pages of dense contracts in minutes.

Without this edge delivered by a combination of AI and CLM, it is easy for an organization to fall behind in a world where dramatic shifts can happen so suddenly. CLM augmented by AI helps keep up with rapid change for a rapidly changing world.

Onit Catalyst Contract Extraction helps find, organize, and action critical information in large volumes of contracts. Click here to learn more.