AI as legal partner

Contract review tops the list of time-consuming tasks in most legal departments. Paradoxically, it's often the least value-creating part of the process that takes the longest time. But your lawyers can use AI as a tool that saves many hours of work – without compromising on quality.

The reason contract review is such a time-consuming task is both that your lawyers probably handle a great many contracts, and that each individual contract review is often time-consuming in itself.

And when the legal function is under pressure from tasks that are constantly growing in scope, volume and complexity, it's understandable if your lawyers sometimes get a glazed look when yet another mammoth contract lands on their desk.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

At Basico, we've found that AI can take a significant load off contract review without compromising the quality of the work – and we've seen the effect of this in our work with legal teams.

Your lawyers can use AI to gain that crucial overview of a contract's content – what's acceptable, what should at minimum be considered internally, and what needs to be negotiated? Because in a contract of more than a few pages, that's a task that can take a very long time indeed.

In this way, AI functions as your lawyers' dream associate – the thorough colleague who can do the first, systematic read-through and serve up the results on a silver platter.

But employees out in the business will also be able to use AI to ease the Legal function's workload in the contract area. Because in many companies, Legal gets involved in tasks that strictly speaking don't require legal expertise.

Often, for example, a salesperson or a member of the development team could negotiate most simple contracts themselves, but we rarely see that solution in practice – simply because there's no one out in the business who has learnt to assess the content of a contract. Instead, we often see Legal being involved from the beginning, just to be on the safe side – or the business not addressing the legal aspects at all and simply signing terms and conditions.

But even the best tool creates no value if it isn't used. And your lawyers won't use a tool they don't trust.

We've found that lawyers' trust in AI grows as they see concrete examples of how AI identifies risks and points of attention in contracts. Therefore, we recommend an approach that appeals to lawyers' natural scepticism:

In the beginning, the lawyer reviews the contracts themselves – and has AI do the same in parallel. The lawyer then compares their own review with the AI's and focuses particularly on areas where the AI finds things they themselves have missed. The next step is for AI to take the lead, whilst the lawyer checks afterwards. Gradually, the lawyer will gain enough trust to let AI handle the task independently.

Because you'll quickly discover that AI finds more in the contract than the lawyer would have done themselves.

But using AI for contract review is more than just a way to save time – it's part of the system support that creates the foundation for a well-functioning legal department. When we talk about optimising Legal as a function, it's partly about letting technology take the load off routine-heavy tasks.

Because the goal isn't to replace lawyers, but to let them focus on the work where they create the most value.

Effective system support is about creating structure and predictability in workflows, and by automating parts of your contract management, you gain better quality, fewer errors and a legal function that can scale with the business.

It doesn't just free up time – it also creates clarity about where your lawyers create the most value. Instead of spending valuable hours reading through standard clauses and identifying deviations, your lawyers can focus on strategic advice, complex risk assessment and negotiations that require legal judgement.

Contact us if you'd like help setting up an AI solution for contract review in Legal – or sparring on your opportunities for using AI to create value in your company's legal function.