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

Let me start with something that will probably get me hate mail from lawyers: Your company should have zero in-house lawyers doing contract review by 2030.

I’m not saying this to be provocative. I’m saying it because the math is brutal, and most executives are too polite to do anything about it.

The 90 percent rule

At Concord, we’ve analyzed thousands of contracts. More than nine out of ten get signed without a single redline. HR documents. Vendor agreements. Customer contracts. All templates. All routine.

Yet companies still pay full-time lawyers six-figure salaries to “review” them. That’s not legal work. That’s expensive bureaucracy.

The real numbers

Independent research confirms it: AI reviews contracts in 26 seconds with better accuracy than junior lawyers. Meanwhile, CFOs know they’re paying $300 to $500 an hour for reviews that don’t change anything. Contracts sit in legal for two weeks while working capital is stuck in purgatory.

The math doesn’t lie. The average low-risk contract costs almost $7,000 to process. For complex agreements, it’s closer to $50,000. And those costs have been climbing.

What our customers already know

Here’s the reality: 70 percent of Concord customers don’t have in-house legal teams anymore. Some keep a paralegal. Others lean on outside counsel for complex work. But routine contracts? They’re owned by finance and operations, where the cash flow impact actually matters.

This isn’t about being reckless. It’s about moving faster. Contract lifecycle management software like Concord puts control in the hands of the teams who care about speed, compliance, and revenue recognition.

My own lesson

I learned this the hard way in 2009. I spent six months at a €5 billion French telecom manually reviewing thousands of vendor contracts. Building spreadsheets with 52 columns. Emailing Word docs back and forth. It was glorified data entry, not legal strategy. And it taught me a simple truth: most “legal work” isn’t legal at all.

The blueprint forward

1. Audit which contracts actually get negotiated. It’s less than 10 percent.

2. Use AI contract review for the rest. Faster, cheaper, more accurate.

3. Standardize everything that can be templated.

4. Keep outside counsel for the handful of deals that genuinely require legal expertise.

The uncomfortable truth

Legal teams know this shift is coming. They see AI doing the work faster and more accurately. They see CFOs questioning why contracts are treated as sacred legal texts when, in reality, they’re financial blueprints.

The companies winning today aren’t the ones with the biggest legal departments. They’re the ones who’ve already made the shift to modern CLM software.

So ask yourself: are you going to lead that shift? Or explain to your board why your competitors are closing deals twice as fast while you wait for legal to rubber-stamp another NDA.