The Impact of AI for Legal Ops: Types, Benefits and Risks

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You get curated playlists on your favorite music apps.

You can purchase cars that drive themselves.

You tell a speaker sitting on your kitchen counter to set a timer for your food.

Whether you realize it or not, that’s all possible because of artificial intelligence. AI is nothing new.

What is new is how legal and legal ops teams are beginning to use it—not just to speed up tasks, but to transform the way contracts are managed, reviewed, and enforced.

Let’s take a look at the impact of AI in legal operations, how you can use it, the risks it comes with, and what it all boils down to.

The Types of AI for Legal Ops

Not counting moments of random curiosity, how often do you question how technology works? Probably not too frequently. We just trust that AI works and gives us the outputs that we want.

But when it comes to using artificial intelligence in the legal space, you need to do a bit more digging to understand how the technology operates and delivers the benefits you hope to get.

To that end, there are a few different types of AI that Legal Operations can use to empower their jobs and improve efficiencies across their businesses.

Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) uses specific data and algorithms to imitate how human beings learn. Over time, this AI becomes more accurate in predicting the way your legal ops team would perform certain tasks and mimics them.

Natural Language Processing

This form of AI uses machine learning to enable computers to learn and communicate using human language. NLP makes it much easier to ask AI questions, in the same way you would ask a person.

Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) train on large amounts of data and detect patterns to allow the AI to understand natural language and perform a wide variety of tasks.

Generative AI

The most recent craze in the AI world, generative AI creates content in response to your request. Depending on the platform you’re using, getting the result you want can be as easy as typing out a single sentence.

Now that you have a better idea of how this technology works on the backend, let’s take a look at how you can specifically use AI for legal operations.

The Benefits of Contract AI

The ways you can use contract AI are limitless.

From contract authoring to performance monitoring, these different forms of artificial intelligence offer an easy, fast, and accurate way to improve your contracting processes.

1. Contract Drafting and Review

One task at the top of every Legal Ops team’s to-do list? Find a way to cut down on how long it takes to draft and review contracts.

Contract AI uses historical data and your approved playbook to draft new contracts in seconds. You won’t have to spend an entire afternoon writing up contracts from scratch.

Need to review your existing portfolio or a new agreement coming in from a counterparty? That same technology can analyze documents in any format, so you learn exactly what data and terms they contain.

2. Legal Research

You have questions about existing contracts. Contract AI delivers the answers.

Rather than waste time manually searching through storage drives or (we shutter) paper documents, you can prompt your AI-powered CLM to pull up exactly what you’re looking for.

Just type out “Show me contracts expiring in six months” or “Give me a risk profile for our current contracts.” You’ll have your answers in seconds. Talk about efficiency.

3. Data Management

By using AI to ingest your business’ contracts into a unified, intelligent repository, you turn them into interactive sources of data. With that level of accessible information, you can make better-informed decisions that improve your overall business.

4. Contract Visibility

Manually managing contract data severely restricts how easily you can determine what’s in your agreements. Never mind using that information to reduce risk and maintain contract compliance.

Once you store your contracts in a cloud-based repository, AI delivers complete visibility into every agreement, including how one document relates to another.

5. Compliance Tracking

From adhering to regulatory requirements to being ready for internal audits, compliance tracking is a key part of reducing contract risk. But leaving Legal Ops to track every compliance-related term manually almost guarantees you’ll land in hot water.

Contract AI detects and corrects non-compliant language, monitors regulatory terms, and ensures on-time obligations so you’re never caught by surprise. And that’s all with reduced governance costs.

6. Obligation Monitoring

Manually tracking obligations from thousands of contracts is nearly impossible.

On top of giving you full visibility into every contracted obligation, contract AI lets you:

Visually monitor contract performance
Track any obligation back to its specific contract and clause
Identify the financial impact of your contract obligations

7. Spend Management

Every financial aspect of your contracts—pricing, billing dates, and obligation delivery schedules—affects how well your finance team can budget and forecast revenue.

Legal Ops can leverage contract AI to get real-time financial data and streamline invoicing to help finance teams ensure cash flow and avoid value leakage via poor contract performance.

8. Policy Distribution

In a perfect world, once Legal Ops establishes a process or policy, everyone in the enterprise will follow it. In reality, it takes a bit more work to get everyone on board.

Using AI-powered CLM, your legal ops team can set up workflows and maintain legal-approved templates and clauses libraries in a single platform. This way, there’s no guessing if certain language or actions align with approved processes. The contract AI will flag anything that doesn’t.

9. Contract Storage

Raise your hand if your contracts are currently stored in six different (disconnected) platforms or locked Google Drives that only certain people can access.

CLM platforms powered by contract AI let you house your entire contract portfolio in a single, secure repository. Every contract version, from the initial draft to the final execution, is right where you need it.

10. Workflow Automation

It’s tedious enough having to manually push contracts to the next step of their lifecycle. Add the frustration you feel when you find out two weeks later that a time-sensitive agreement has been sitting, waiting to be pushed on, and your day’s all but ruined.

Skip the stress and use contract AI to set up customizable workflows and automate contracting tasks for streamlined processes.

Now, even with all the benefits AI offers Legal Ops, every technology has its risks.

Clearly, contract AI brings transformative potential—but what does this look like across different roles in the legal ecosystem? Let’s take a closer look.

AI Use Cases Across Legal Ops Roles

AI isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Its value depends on the person using it—and the problems they’re trying to solve. Here’s how it empowers different roles within legal operations:

Legal Role	How AI Helps
Legal Counsel	Drafts and reviews contracts faster; flags risky clauses
Legal Operations	Streamlines workflows, automates obligation tracking, and drives compliance
Contract Manager	Improves visibility, manages renewals, and enforces standardization
Compliance Officer	Ensures adherence to regulatory terms through automated compliance checks

This cross-functional impact makes AI an essential tool for modern legal departments, especially in complex enterprises.

If you’re considering implementing contract AI, the next question is: how do you actually get started? Let’s break it down into a few manageable steps.

How to Implement Contract AI in Legal Operations

Rolling out AI doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With the right strategy, legal teams can adopt it incrementally and effectively. Here’s a phased approach that works for most organizations:

Identify Key Use Cases: Start small—AI contract review or renewal alerts are high-impact and easy to adopt.
Choose the Right CLM Platform: Look for an AI-native CLM platform with robust NLP/LLM capabilities, strong security, and no data leakage to external LLMs.
Train the Team: Offer enablement workshops and tutorials on how to get insights from
AI tools and validate outputs.
Establish Human Oversight: Build a review process where legal experts validate AI outputs—especially for sensitive or complex contracts.
Track KPIs: Measure improvements in contract turnaround time, risk exposure reduction, and compliance metrics.

Even with a solid plan, it’s important to acknowledge the risks of integrating AI into legal processes. Let’s walk through them.

The Risks of AI in Legal Operations

Especially as more and more legal functions consider adopting AI solutions to improve contracting, some common concerns have had teams treading lightly.

A Lack of Emotion

Certain issues, such as negotiations, mediation, and litigation, have a lot of emotional ties to them. While lawyers can consider more personal factors when drafting contracts or making legal decisions, AI often approaches matters more objectively.

This makes it all the more important for your in-house counsel to act as a human check for your contracting tasks after AI has handled the heavy lifting.

Training Concerns

AI is only as good as the data set used to train it. Some training preferences can influence datasets, potentially limiting their ability to produce certain results.

To avoid this, you’ll have to ensure the data used to train the contract AI solution you use has been trained on a wide enough set of data to avoid narrow result possibilities.

Ethical Concerns

Depending on how contract AI is trained, results could lead to unjust outcomes for certain parties.

You would want to ensure the contract AI you use has measures in place to avoid biases, hallucinations, and general errors that can lead to heavy consequences for the involved parties.

Security Concerns

Some teams are concerned that relying on AI can lead to data breaches or result in private data being used to train larger models without consent.

This is why you should only consider CLM platforms that do not use your data to train their LLMs. Additionally, those solutions should have strict data security measures in place to keep your data secure from third parties outside their own environment.

When you weigh the benefits and risks Legal Ops can experience when using contract AI, you can arrive at a few clear conclusions.

The Implications of AI for Legal Operations

With all the different AI technologies available to legal and legal operations teams, one question looms.

What does it all mean?

Well, there are two main takeaways from everything we’ve learned.

AI Makes a Huge Difference in Legal Ops Efficiency

There’s no denying the ease and accuracy of contract AI.

From contract drafting to administration, AI helps legal ops teams streamline and optimize their processes for faster contracting with fewer errors.

By implementing this technology into your everyday operations, Legal Ops can maximize realized contract value and minimize risk, turning contracting processes into a well-oiled machine.

It Matters Who You Partner With

Not all contract AI platforms are the same.

You need to carefully research a solution’s training and security measures to ensure your data will be safe and you can reduce the chance of bias or hallucination. Give shopping for an AI-powered CLM platform the same due diligence that you would an M&A deal.

You’ll be glad you did when you find the platform that best fits your needs and standards.

Now, let’s shift gears one last time and look at where this technology is heading next.

Future Trends in AI for Legal Ops

AI for legal ops is far from static. The future points to even more advanced capabilities, making it essential to start now and evolve alongside the technology.

Conversational CLM: AI-powered chat interfaces will let you ask “What’s our exposure under the Force Majeure clause?” and get instant answers.
Proactive Risk Mitigation: Predictive analytics will surface risk even before contract creation.
Real-time Negotiation Bots: GenAI tools will eventually support redlining and counterparty negotiation tips in real-time.
Embedded Legal Intelligence: Clause libraries will automatically update based on regulation changes or internal policy shifts.

These trends point to a future where legal is not just supported by technology—but deeply embedded with it.

The Bottom Line: Find a Contract AI Platform That Fits

Like any other technology, contract AI does present some risk. But, as long as you choose the right CLM solution, those risks pale in comparison to all the benefits it offers.

Your legal operations team can use Sirion’s AI-native CLM Platform to centralize your contracts, get the answers you need in seconds, and smash bottlenecks to minimize delays and drive the business forward.

Ask us how we can turn your contracts into living documents while protecting your data on our secure platform.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are some early indicators that a legal team is ready to adopt AI tools?

If your legal ops team is facing delays in contract cycles, struggling with data visibility, or managing too many manual tasks across disjointed systems, those are strong signs you’re ready to explore AI. A central goal should be to reduce friction in repetitive workflows.

How can legal ops teams build internal buy-in for AI implementation?

Start with a pilot use case that shows measurable gains—such as faster NDA turnaround or improved clause standardization. Communicate results to leadership using data and process benchmarks to build trust and momentum.

Can AI in legal ops support global teams working across multiple jurisdictions?

Yes. AI tools, especially those trained on diverse contract data sets, can be configured to recognize jurisdiction-specific clauses, regulatory requirements, and language nuances—making them useful for multinational legal teams.

What should I ask a CLM vendor about their AI capabilities?

You should ask:

Is your AI built natively or added on later?
What datasets were used to train it?
Do you use customer data to retrain your models?
How does your AI handle hallucinations or flag uncertain outputs?
Can users control or audit AI suggestions?

Are there legal or regulatory guidelines around using AI in contract management?

While there are no universal laws on AI in contract management yet, data privacy (like GDPR) and legal ethics still apply. Enterprises should choose vendors who comply with industry standards and offer auditability and transparency in how their AI operates.

How does AI affect collaboration between legal and other departments?

AI acts as a connector—it centralizes contract information, reduces legal bottlenecks, and enables business teams (like sales or procurement) to work more independently while still following approved legal protocols.

What’s the difference between AI-based contract management and traditional automation tools?

Traditional tools operate on static rules (if-this-then-that logic), while AI can learn from data, understand context, and make dynamic suggestions—whether it’s flagging risk in a clause or recommending a preferred fallback term.

Additional Resources

Contract Management