Managing everything from reviewing marketing materials to negotiating M&A deals, legal teams have to both protect the business and contribute to the bottom line.
Despite their many responsibilities and hectic workload, legal teams tend to operate lean. ACC’s 2022 Legal Department Management Benchmarking Report shows that companies have an average of four in-house lawyers on staff to support the entire business.
Without technology, small legal teams can crumble under the weight of their to-do list. Fortunately, legal AI can supplement headcount on small teams and free up legal’s time to focus on more strategic initiatives. AI tools can relieve the burden of tedious tasks by streamlining contract workflows.
Here are 3 benefits of legal AI for a small team.
Shortens Contract Review
Contract review can take up a small team’s entire bandwidth. Poring over hundreds of contracts to analyze risk and check for key provisions will make anyone cross-eyed and crabby. It can take hours, and after a while, even the most experienced lawyers start to make manual errors.
Legal AI can take over this task for small legal teams. Well-trained AI can identify anomalies and inconsistencies within contracts way faster than a human lawyer can, helping lawyers determine where to focus their efforts and get through contract review faster.
Makes Contracts Searchable
After signing and executing a contract, legal teams — and your cross-functional collaborators — need to know what’s inside the contract in order to fulfill the terms. Additionally, small teams need to be able to quickly check what terms are in effect at any given time. Combing through contracts one by one is not a sustainable way to do this.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology scans and digitizes contracts, allowing you to search the contents of your business contracts. This legal AI enables small teams to stay on top of crucial data like obligations, renewal dates, and termination clauses, and turn that data into business intelligence.
Generate Reports Quickly
If the CEO asked for a report on the liability clauses across your contracts, how quickly would you be able to generate it? How confident would you be that your report would still be relevant by the time you submit it? If you still use paper and static PDF contracts, chances are, your answers to these questions aren’t promising.
In addition to organizing and sorting through contracts, legal AI enables small legal teams to generate complex reports based on the data within their agreements. Using it, you can visually represent data to the C-Suite in a way that helps them make well-informed business decisions. The best part — you can do this in a fraction of the time without disrupting other projects.
Takeaways
Legal AI benefits small legal teams by taking on the more tedious parts of your internal processes and giving them time back in your day. See how LinkSquares can give your team a much-needed boost. Request a demo today.
