Inside the Quiet Reinvention of Legal Operations
Nick Boymal
General Counsel, Sirion
An Australian native, Nick Boymal speaks about legal operations with the calm precision of someone who has spent years inside large organizations, watching not just the legal work itself, but the systems surrounding it. Somewhere between negotiating technology contracts and building in-house legal teams, his attention shifted beyond the contracts themselves.
Why do approvals stall? Why do the same issues keep resurfacing? Why does legal work become harder to scale as organizations grow?
"The legal space has long been defined by this fragmentation," Nick observes.
Over time, his focus shifted from negotiating contracts to the operational friction surrounding them: where approvals slow down, where obligations get missed, and why legal processes become so hard to scale.
What concerned him wasn't the legal advice itself. It was everything around it. Too much important work depended on knowing who to ask, where the latest version lived, or which exception had been approved before. Without structure and connected data, legal teams struggled to measure cycle times, identify bottlenecks, or demonstrate how they were enabling the business.
Those questions eventually shaped the next chapter of Nick's career. They also led him to Sirion.
What appealed to him wasn't simply the opportunity to work with contracts. It was the chance to rethink the systems surrounding them, from workflows and approvals to obligations and operational data, so that legal expertise could be applied more consistently and at scale.
The Complexity of Going Global
Nick spent years working across the Asia Pacific region, which taught him something that shaped how he thinks about global contracting. The commercial issues are largely universal, he says. But underneath them, there are local rules that can quietly trip up an organization that hasn't done its homework.
Add privacy regulations and tax provisions, and you see why a single global contract may not necessarily work in every jurisdiction.
Years of working across Asia Pacific reinforced a lesson Nick still carries with him: the commercial principles are often universal. The operational realities rarely are. "Some businesses end up with a different playbook depending on the region," he says. "Or even the country."
That is where AI and connected systems come in, making sure the right template, addendum, and approval path follow the contract automatically, wherever it is being signed.
The Shift Beneath Legal Operations
Nick describes the role of AI in contracting less as modernization for its own sake and more as creating structure around processes that have historically depended on institutional memory.
Modern legal teams are slowly beginning to sound less like traditional legal departments and more like operational hubs. Nick adds, “The narrative around legal is starting to evolve.”
Market data affirms this change. Forecasts suggest the global contract lifecycle management (CLM) software market could grow from about $2.07B in 2026 to more than $5B by 2034, driven by demand from legal, procurement, and sales teams for better contract visibility, automation, and AI-assisted review. (Source: Fortune Business Insights)
The real change, Nick points out, is visibility. The legal issues themselves are often recognizable. The surrounding systems are not. This is where complexity usually arrives quietly, somewhere in the fine print.
Nick says, "It is the gradual shift from fragmented contracting toward visible, measurable, and connected legal operations." He adds, “Without centralized systems, even basic questions become difficult: Which contracts carry a certain liability risk? Which agreements are affected by a regulatory change? Which renewals are approaching?”.
Overcoming AI Barriers
The transition to a digital legal operation is rarely a matter of installing software and watching the old habits dissolve. What it actually requires is something considerably more uncomfortable—persuading lawyers to stop doing things the way they have always done them.
"Lawyers get used to receiving requests by email, and the business gets used to sending an email to their favorite lawyer who they prefer to deal with," Nick notes. "Changing that habit takes more than technology. It takes a process people trust. And, breaking that loop is a cultural challenge that organizations have to actively manage."
Contract management doesn't happen in isolation. You have to understand the context you're working in and you have to know what kind of contract you're actually dealing with.
For Nick, complexity, value, and risk all change how a contract needs to be managed. A transactional contract and a strategic one are not the same thing, and treating them the same way is a mistake.
Nick breaks contracts into four broad categories: transactional, routine, complex, and strategic. Each one demands a different level of oversight. The steps he outlines map specific management activities against each category, so teams know not just what to do, but how much attention a given contract actually warrants.
But knowing the category is only the starting point. The harder question is what happens next: who approves it, what fallback positions apply, when does it escalate, and who owns the outcome?
This is where playbooks come in. Nick is clear about their importance. Many companies do not have formal playbooks, but AI tools now make them relatively easy to create. Without clearly defined approval rules, escalation paths, fallback clauses, and risk tolerances documented and built into a workflow, organizations end up reinventing the process every time.
Then, there is the fundamental trust factor. Many lawyers harbor valid concerns that automation and AI might misinterpret nuances or make mistakes. Addressing this requires rigorous, transparent testing and a strict commitment to keeping humans in the loop, particularly in high-risk, high-value legal areas.
The Evolution of the Practitioner
What people don't always know is that Nick almost didn't become a lawyer at all. At school, he had his sights set on accounting. He ended up doing a combined degree, law and accounting, and it was only once he got into in-house work that the legal side took hold. The accounting instinct never left him, though.
It shaped how he thought about legal work itself. Not simply as a series of matters to be completed, but as a function that could be measured, improved, and designed. It shows up every time he talks about measuring cycle times, tracking intake volumes, and turning legal work into data.
His approach to the transition is less a mandate than gradual conditioning. "The first step," he says, "is to get the legal team comfortable with technology, and in particular using AI to assist with certain tasks. It's amazing the number of use cases where AI can really help an in-house legal team."
That comfort begins with demystification, treating AI not as an invasive intelligence arriving to reorganize the profession, but as a tool to be learned and configured by the people who will use it. "It is imperative for lawyers to train themselves on AI and prompting techniques," he suggests
Getting comfortable with data is the next step. "I recommend getting the legal team used to looking at data," Nick says. "A very good starting point is to use technology to track all the requests for legal work and then share that data with the team. The next step would be to measure cycle times for different types of work and see where automation drives an improvement in productivity over time.”
For a profession that has long operated on instinct and memory, that is a real adjustment. But once lawyers start seeing their own work in numbers, the department stops being a black box. That is also when contracts stop looking like legal documents and start looking like operational assets, capturing the commitments, obligations, approvals, and business data that organizations rely on every day.
"The contract becomes less a finished document," Nick says, "and more a living operational asset."
From Legal Expert to Operational Thinkers
Nick does not think lawyers are being replaced. He does believe the job is changing. “The question isn't whether AI will replace lawyers—it's how lawyers will evolve alongside AI. The profession is moving from a model centered on producing legal work to one focused on interpreting, validating, and strategically applying it. Those who can effectively leverage technology will be best positioned to lead in this new environment. “
He does believe the job is changing. The legal leaders who will thrive aren't simply those with strong technical expertise. They'll be the ones who can translate that expertise into systems and processes the business can rely on. For years, legal excellence lived in individual expertise. The next chapter is about institutionalizing that expertise so the business can move faster without increasing risk.
“High-performing legal teams will measure the requests coming into the department,” he says. “They’ll measure volumes, trends, and cycle times.”
That shift matters particularly for younger lawyers entering the profession now. AI, he argues, should function more like a junior lawyer than an autonomous decision-maker.
“The output does need to be carefully checked by a lawyer,” he says. “A junior lawyer wouldn’t necessarily produce a response that’s 100% accurate. Neither will the AI.”
That balance between speed and oversight appears repeatedly in how he talks about legal technology. The goal is not to remove lawyers from the process. The goal is to remove unnecessary friction around every day endeavors. Increasingly, legal leaders are being asked not only to provide expert advice, but to design the systems through which that expertise flows.
The End of Invisible Work
In his free time, Nick enjoys watching dystopian and post-apocalyptic TV dramas built around institutions, systems, and the hidden structures shaping how people work. But the connection to his professional life feels difficult to miss.
What once functioned primarily as a signed document stored away after negotiation increasingly behaves more like operational infrastructure, carrying obligations, approvals, compliance commitments, and business context long after signature.
For Nick, that shift feels less like disruption and more like overdue clarity.The work lawyers do has always mattered. What's changing is how that expertise is shared, scaled, and embedded into the way the business operates.
Nick's argument, at its core, is simple: the work lawyers do has always mattered. The systems around that work have just never kept up. That is finally changing, not because the profession demanded it, but because the cost of not changing has become too hard to ignore.
The next generation of legal leaders will still negotiate difficult deals and navigate complex risks. But they will also build the systems that allow their teams to operate with greater clarity, consistency, and speed.
The future of legal may still depend on expertise. But increasingly, it will belong to leaders who know how to turn that expertise into something repeatable, measurable, and capable of moving the business forward.
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