Mid-Market EPC Contractor

A mid-market engineering and construction services firm operating across oil & gas, chemicals, and energy transition sectors faced a critical inflection point in 2024. After decades of family ownership, a new CEO was driving organizational modernization and governance maturity. Simultaneously, the company was pursuing aggressive expansion into a new alliance business segment—a fundamental shift requiring higher contract volumes and dramatically faster turnaround times.

The legal department, led by the Deputy General Counsel and Legal Counsel, operated without any centralized contract repository. Two to three decades of contracts were scattered across legal drives, SharePoint folders, Microsoft Teams channels, and business servers in different offices. Some contracts never reached legal at all, remaining on business servers and creating compliance gaps. A previous attempt to implement DocuShare as a repository had failed due to lack of consistent adoption, leaving the team with outdated, unreliable data no one trusted.

Manual contract review created severe bottlenecks. A six-page contract required 30 minutes just to identify key provisions like warranty terms, liability limits, and indemnification clauses. Complex 55-page EPC agreements took hours. Current turnaround time ran approximately one week, creating operational delays and frustrating business stakeholders who needed legal to be "the easy button" for clients.

The timing pressure was acute. The alliance business expansion over the next 6-12 months would require handling contract volumes without proportional headcount growth. NDA volume alone was expected to double from 3-7 weekly to potentially 14+. The team was already operating at 95-100% capacity with no "staring out the window time" for professional development or handling emergencies. Alliance customers prioritized speed and ease of contracting, and the company competed against smaller firms that often accepted client terms without legal review.

The business had received client feedback about "too much red" on contract redlines, creating tension between legal risk management and sales objectives. Without the ability to quickly reference past precedent—to answer questions like "what limits of liability have I agreed to in the past?"—the team couldn't maintain consistent negotiating positions or efficiently assess incoming contracts.

The new CEO demanded more robust reporting on contract terms, risks, and obligations across the portfolio. Manual contract summarization and report creation for management review took considerable time after the heavy analytical work of contract review was already complete. This administrative work was described as demoralizing low-value tasks that prevented lawyers from focusing on strategic analysis.

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The legal team's search for a contract lifecycle management solution actually began two years earlier. In 2023, the company had completed a full evaluation of Leah CLM platform. The team "loved the system and the price wasn't shocking," but organizational budget cuts that year forced them to halt procurement entirely. The evaluation had validated product fit and pricing, with only timing as the barrier.

In early 2024, several factors created the strategic opening for reconsidering the investment. The new CEO, while introducing fiscal responsibility culture, remained explicitly open to technology investments demonstrating clear business value and ROI. External pressure emerged when clients mentioned using AI themselves, prompting internal questions about why the company wasn't leveraging similar capabilities. The business reorganization and alliance segment expansion created compelling "why now" urgency that transcended departmental efficiency goals.

The team also evaluated Thomas Reuters' AI offering but found it severely underwhelming. The solution felt like enhanced Westlaw search capability rather than true artificial intelligence, providing no meaningful advantage over manually searching Westlaw for legal questions. It didn't demonstrate the contract-specific intelligence needed for rapid risk assessment and provision extraction.

What the company needed was fundamentally different from enhanced legal research tools. They needed a solution that could understand unstructured contract language, answer natural language questions without Boolean operators, and deliver instant risk assessment on incoming agreements. They needed precedent research capabilities that would let them query across decades of contracts to find comparable language and terms. They needed to handle volume growth without hiring additional lawyers, while simultaneously improving speed and maintaining sophisticated risk management standards.

The evaluation criteria were clear: true generative AI that comprehends contract context, transparent reasoning that maintains lawyer oversight, natural language question answering, contract-specific functionality beyond general legal research, integration potential for phased implementation, and competitive pricing that reflected delivered value. The solution also needed to address both immediate pain points and longer-term CLM requirements as organizational maturity evolved.

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