As AI continues to be embedded in contract lifecycle management – an area rapidly emerging as a cornerstone of legal operations for in-house teams – Conga’s director of strategy, innovation, and transformation emphasises that this space is generating both growing excitement and a fair degree of confusion.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Corporate Counsel Show, Charles Harb, Conga’s director of strategy, innovation, and transformation, highlighted the immense potential of AI to enhance legal departments’ contract lifecycle management (CLM), while cautioning that challenges can arise if it is not implemented with the right expectations.
In the same episode, he outlined the key challenges and emerging trends he’s observing among in-house counsel and shared insights on how legal departments can effectively evaluate and adopt new technologies to best serve their teams’ needs.
Based on his observations within the legal profession, Harb explained that the impact of AI on contract lifecycle management is one of the most widely discussed topics in the legal tech space.
“AI is a huge topic in CLM right now. Every conference that I attend where I’m speaking with lawyers or whether it’s a big conference with 300 people or a small legal team with a dozen people or so on,” he said.
Harb explained that the growing interest in AI is understandable, given that CLM systems have traditionally required significant manual input, and AI is now proving to be a powerful efficiency tool in reducing that burden.
“AI can be an extremely useful tool. It helps extract metadata and clauses from your legacy contracts or your third-party contracts, it can help you do things like flag risks and identify obligations,” he noted.
“[It] can even do things like suggest red lines and provide some insights on how to manage your actual contract repository.”
Despite the buzz, Harb cautions against viewing AI as a silver bullet for contracting challenges, emphasising that its effectiveness ultimately depends on the quality of the data it’s trained on and the context in which it is applied.
“But I think what I’m seeing is a lot of people believe that AI is some sort of magic bullet. It’s really only as good as the information that’s driving it and the training that’s been put into it,” he stated.
“We all know the concept of large language models, so AI understands what you’re telling, asking it to do, but it needs context around the contracts that you are actually using.”
Perhaps the most important point for legal leaders to remember, Harb said, is that while AI can significantly speed up processes in CLM, in-house lawyers must remain firmly in the driver’s seat.
“While AI is a fantastic efficiency tool, it can’t do everything. As lawyers, you really don’t want it to. I’ve seen contract negotiations where the negotiations were held up for three weeks over the placement of a comma in a course,” he outlined.
“Because that’s what AI is. It’s a great efficiency tool, but you don’t want it making your final decisions, especially in the legal space.”
