Legal departments are undergoing a revolution. Long considered among the most traditional parts of a business, they are embracing one of the most disruptive forces in modern enterprise: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in contracts management. Where lawyers were once burdened by repetitive, manual reviews, AI is enabling faster turnarounds, greater consistency, and sharper insights — allowing legal professionals to shift their focus to more strategic, high-value work.
But this isn’t just a technology story. It’s about how people and AI can complement each other, and what it takes to get that relationship right.
Humans and AI: The Real Opportunity
As AI matures, we now understand it is most powerful when it supports legal professionals, not when it tries to imitate or replace them. Lawyers bring nuance, experience, and the ability to weigh commercial context. AI brings speed, consistency, and the capacity to process vast volumes of data.
The best outcomes emerge when AI is designed to behave more like a skilled human, adapting to context and flagging nuanced issues, and when people approach their work with the clarity, structure, and data fluency of a computer. By training both systems and people to collaborate effectively, legal departments can unlock significant value.
Why Contracts Review Is the Ideal Use Case
Contracts management has always been time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitive — the perfect environment for automation. Today’s AI tools can be trained to recognise a legal department’s preferred language and risk tolerances. They can compare clauses against pre-set policies and flag anything that deviates, giving human lawyers a faster, more targeted starting point.
Rather than spending hours reading every word of a document, legal teams can focus on the elements that truly require their judgment: ambiguity, interdependencies between clauses, or risks that aren’t obvious without broader context. It’s a much more efficient allocation of resources and a more rewarding use of human expertise.
AI is also capable of drawing on far more examples than any one person. Although a senior lawyer may have reviewed thousands of contracts over their career, an AI tool trained on data sets from across sectors and jurisdictions can instantly access and compare against millions of contracts. This breadth of exposure allows for faster pattern recognition and more consistent issue spotting.
Precision, Recall, and the Limits of AI
Even the best systems aren’t perfect. Understanding what AI can and cannot do is critical to using it effectively. Two important metrics guide performance evaluation in legal AI: recall and precision. Recall refers to AI’s ability to find all the relevant clauses. Precision measures how many of those results are useful, rather than irrelevant or distracting.
Most AI tools today prioritise recall, i.e., they aim to catch everything that might be important. But that can result in too much ‘noise,’ with key issues buried in irrelevant details. That’s where skilled legal professionals are essential to sift, interpret, and apply judgment. AI may get the review from A to J, but it still takes a human to get from K to Z.
It’s also important to recognise how clauses interact. AI typically reviews text in isolation, but legal meaning often arises from how different provisions work together. A limitation clause might seem harmless until read alongside an indemnity clause elsewhere. That kind of holistic reading is still uniquely human and critical to protecting the business.
A New Kind of Legal Work
There’s no question that AI is changing the way lawyers work, it’s freeing lawyers from the repetitive, lower-value tasks that previously took up much of their time. What’s left is strategic, stimulating work: interpreting risk, advising clients, and driving better business decisions.
This shift is also changing how legal tech is introduced. In the past, automation tools were often implemented by procurement or IT departments. AI reverses that dynamic. Now, legal professionals can configure the systems themselves, designing them to reflect the way they want to work, the risks they’re willing to accept, and the policies they want to enforce.
That control is empowering. It gives lawyers the tools to be more than gatekeepers — they can become enablers of faster deals, better compliance, and smarter growth. They can take pride in the fact that they’re supporting not just their businesses, but also innovation goals.
AI in contracts management isn’t about choosing between humans and machines; it’s about designing a working relationship between the two. When legal professionals leverage AI for what it does best, and when AI is trained to support human judgment, the result is smarter, faster, and more strategic legal work.
By embracing this evolution, legal teams position themselves not just as efficient reviewers of contracts, but as essential partners in business innovation.
Beth Anderson, Director, Contract Solutions at leading legal and compliance services platform, Epiq
