The Ivo team joined thousands of legal professionals in Philadelphia recently for the Association of Corporate Counsel Annual Meeting. The team met dozens of lawyers and legal ops professionals in every industry and working for companies of every size, and a prominent theme that emerged is that small, lean legal teams are overwhelmed with high volumes of work and are hoping that AI can help.

In numerous conversations that the team had with legal professionals, we heard the same stories over and over again:

• Teams have C-suite mandates to “start using AI,” but are overwhelmed by the sheer number of options, all of whom promise very similar benefits, and don’t know how to determine what good looks like or even how to distinguish one vendor from another. “It’s a tough time to be a buyer right now,” one person observed, noting that there are so many contract review vendors in particular that all sound the same.
• Wasting time is a major pain point for in-house legal teams. Legal professionals spend hours, or sometimes even days, reviewing and redlining contracts, and are eager to find a way to reduce this workload. In addition, if legal teams wanted to find any insights in the content, it would take them hours. We heard one story about a GC who tried to analyze their contracts by hand in their CLM. “There went five hours,” she said.
• Trying to access data that lives in a CLM is a laborious and tedious process. Many people were interested in solutions that would make that workflow easier.

For us, there were three key takeaways:

• Overwhelmed teams are anxious to use AI to ease their workload. While they may already have a mandate from their company leadership to use AI, they’re already interested in the technology. They just need to know how to select a vendor.
• Legal teams are anxious to prove their importance to the business and the ROI of their time and effort. Contract intelligence might be the way to do that, but getting the insights out of contracts is such a laborious process.
• CLMs no longer work for what lawyers need to do with their contracts. They’re fine for storage, but as soon as legal professionals need to do anything with their contracts, their limitations in search and information retrieval become very clear.

We hear the message loud and clear: The market for legal tech has matured at an incredible rate in the last few months. Teams want to use AI to clear out their workloads, and want to understand what technology is available and guidance on how to select tools.

Take a look at this webinar to get more advice on how in-house counsel should use AI tools.