It’s Time To Fire Your Legal Team (From Contract Management)

Last week, I talked with a customer who runs a 300-person construction company. They’ve been around for over 70 years, operate in 12 cities and manage millions of dollars in contracts annually. 

Know what they don’t have? An in-house legal team. 

They fired them all two years ago. Yet, they’ve maintained full SOC2 compliance and improved audit trails compared with before. 

Before you close this article, hear me out: This isn’t some reckless startup. It’s Yates Construction: a company that saved $15,000 every month after eliminating its legal department. They process contracts faster, with fewer errors, and their board loves the improved visibility into contract obligations. 

They’re not brave. They’re just early. 

The math your board should see 

Here’s what every CFO knows but won’t say out loud: You’re paying lawyers $300 to $500 an hour to review contracts that never change. Meanwhile, your cash conversion cycle suffers because deals sit in legal for two weeks. 

Think about your last 100 vendor contracts. How many actually got negotiated? How many just got signed as-is? If you’re honest, it’s 90 percent rubber-stamping. 

That’s not legal work. That’s the most expensive administrative function in your company. 

I learned this firsthand in 2009, when I spent six months at a 5 billion euro French telecom company manually reviewing vendor contracts. Building spreadsheets with 52 columns. Emailing Word documents to hundreds of people. The revelation? Most were identical templates. We were paying brilliant legal minds to do glorified data entry while our working capital sat frozen in contract purgatory. 

The question your competitors have already asked 

Will Salesforce really sue you for non-compliance with your subscription terms? Is AWS taking you to court over a standard service agreement? 

Your competitors figured this out: Contracts aren’t legal documents. They’re operational workflows. They determine your revenue recognition timing, your payment terms and your renewal revenue. Treating them like sacred legal texts while your competition processes them in hours is choosing to lose. 

The transformation hiding in plain sight 

Today, AI reviews standard contracts in 26 seconds with better accuracy than junior lawyers. It catches missing payment terms, flags unusual clauses and maintains perfect audit trails. More importantly, it recognizes the distinction between a contract that requires human expertise and one that doesn’t. 

Your NDAs? Template. Your vendor agreements? Template. Your customer terms? Template. 

AI handles the 90 percent that never get negotiated. Your lawyers—if you keep any—focus on the 10 percent that actually protect enterprise value: M&A, complex partnerships, intellectual property disputes. 

The playbook nobody’s sharing 

Here’s precisely what Yates and other forward-thinking CFOs did: 

First, they audited which contracts get negotiated versus rubber-stamped. The results shocked their boards. Less than 8 percent saw any changes. 

Second, they implemented AI review with stronger compliance controls than their legal teams ever maintained. Every contract is logged, every obligation is tracked, and every risk is flagged automatically. 

Third, they kept outside counsel for complex work: the stuff requiring actual legal expertise and strategic thinking. 

Fourth, they gave contract ownership to finance and operations—the teams who actually care about cash flow impact and renewal optimization. 

The result? Faster revenue recognition, improved days sales outstanding and freed-up capital for growth initiatives instead of legal overhead. 

Your competition is already moving 

One software company we work with went from a full legal department to a single paralegal. Contract processing dropped from two weeks to 36 hours. Their revenue velocity increased 23 percent simply from faster contract execution. 

They didn’t announce it. They just quietly transformed while their competitors still shuttle paper between departments, losing deals to faster-moving rivals. 

In three years, having lawyers review routine contracts will seem as archaic as requiring physical signatures. The CFOs winning today aren’t the ones with the biggest legal departments. They’re the ones who realized that legal review is just pattern matching. And machines do that better. 

It’s fear dressed up as governance. 

What would happen if you stopped reviewing contracts that never change? You’d accelerate revenue, redeploy millions in legal spend to growth initiatives and wonder why your peers haven’t figured this out yet. 

The question isn’t whether to transform legal operations. It’s whether you’ll lead the change or explain to your board why competitors are moving twice your speed.