Don’t Kill ALL the Lawyers was our plea earlier this year because, sometimes, yes, sometimes, you do need a good lawyer in Procurement — just not as often as you think. No matter how much you think you can do (and you can do more than you think), you will still need them for

• (final) contract reviews
• significant clause interpretations
• identification of statutes, regulations, and legal decisions you may be subject to
• review financial and legal reports before submission
• advisory on incident response plans and alternatives

Basically, while LLM powered Legal Tech can do a reasonably good job of

• assembling a contract based on mandatory clauses, required terms and conditions, templates, and past similar contracts (which you can then touch up to your liking)
• identifying clause types
• identifying statutes, regulations, and legal decisions you might be subject to
• identifying whether or not key sections are present in a report before submission
• identify potential incident response plans across libraries

As the tech is NOT intelligent, it cannot

• identify whether a contract meets your goals, only if it contains clauses that you have identified
• tell you how a clause is likely to be interpreted by a court, as there is always some ambiguity in a clause, and opposing council might be intent on shoving as much ambiguity in there as possible to increase the chance a ruling goes in their client’s favour if something goes wrong
• identify how likely you are to be subject to a new statute, regulation, or legal decision where it is a matter of interpretation
• determine if the report is financially accurate or makes sufficient disclosures to satisfy the letter and the spirit of the regulatory requirement
• determine the potential legal ramifications of a response

that requires an intelligent HUMAN lawyer!

But as we previously indicated, you can do a lot with some intelligence and tech. And you can do even more if you use Legal Tech backed by real lawyers with Human Intelligence (HI!).

For example, if you power your contract creation with a clause library vetted by real lawyers with annotations as to categories, geographies, and regulations the clause is for / satisfies, the contract creation tool can do a better job, leave you less to edit, and allow a faster review.

If you compare a contract to a clause library with comments and annotations on plain English meanings, best practices, and red flags that was developed and annotated by lawyers with Human Intelligence (HI!), you will have instant insight into what you need to negotiate, watch out for, and counter with. You will only need to involve legal for standard clauses if it is really vague or you need a heavy hand.

If your Legal team identifies which statutes, regulations, or recent decisions could affect your organization, how, and when, and tags the geographies, categories, parties, etc. that could be subject, you will instantly have that information when considering an award and then when drafting/reviewing a contract.

So yes, you should embrace Legal Tech to keep your Procurement timelines down (as well as external counsel fees), but only if it is backed and augmented by lawyers with Human Intelligence (HI!).