The explosion of contracts in a legal department can seem nearly impossible to handle, but at Legalweek 2025, in-house counsel discussed finding the right tools and teams to better contain the issue
NEW YORK — Think about the number of agreements you sign in a day. It could be a privacy agreement when signing up for a new website, a services agreement when signing up for a lawn care service, even signing for the check when out at a restaurant. The vast number of agreements that a single person makes in a single week, or month, or year can be staggering.
Now scale that up to an entire company. Take pharmaceutical company Organon, for instance. In 2021, Organon was spun off from pharma giant Merck, and suddenly its much smaller legal department had to learn how to handle contracts — and lots of them. Organon had pre-existing agreements in 37 different countries, all in different formats, and needed to figure out how to simplify and consolidate this hoard of contracts.
“Nobody knows where anything is — for every template we have, there are probably 10 to 15 versions of that template floating around,” recalls Stacy Lettie, Chief of Staff to the General Counsel at Organon. “That in itself creates an inefficiency that is so hard to overcome, it’s almost a little daunting.”
However, even the greatest challenges can be overcome. At the recent Legalweek 2025 conference, Lettie and Jamal Brown, Head of Legal Operations and Knowledge Management at JPMorgan Chase, explain how to simplify the complex when it comes to managing the explosion of contracts.
Their takeaway: Such as in life, it takes a village — and this village includes a combination of people plus technology.
The right tool for the job
Originally, Lettie and the Organon team had a mostly manual process to try and compare and contrast contract templates. At one point, she says, the team took over a whole conference room, printed out as many templates as they could find, and sorted them into piles that could be compared against one another.
Now however, she says that technology provides another option, and it’s just a matter of finding the right tool for the job. “We need to lean into the technology to solve that inefficiency because that is one of the most solvable problems that we have in contract management,” Lettie explains. “But also, it doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t need to be a template that solves everything. Let’s make it good enough.”
Indeed, AI technology is becoming a regular starting point for tasks — in fact, 82% of corporate C-suites report having used AI as a starting point for tasks, according to data from Thomson Reuters’ 2024 Future of Professionals Report.
However, not all technology is created equally, the Legalweek panel warns.
Brown says that at JPMorgan, for example, the team has experimented with two separate AI tools for contracting — and gotten two very different results. The first he called “a Cadillac, it was best-in-class and every feature and functionality.” However, it provided a number of solutions to problems the department didn’t necessarily have. In response, the legal department decided to develop “a smaller, medium-value solution that does one thing really well.” And because this solution attacks a single problem, it has been a better value.
“My recommendation is, don’t boil the ocean in the first instance that you build,” Brown notes.
The people side of contract tech
With so many different types of contracts to deal with, however, technology is not the only consideration. Brown and Lettie also discussed how to balance standardization and customization — and importantly, how to make attorneys feel empowered to prioritize what’s important.
Lettie notes that at Organon, the legal department does not actually own the contracting processes, the business side does. The legal team gives the templates and the playbook, but at times, those templates are not always followed, and the business side accepts the client side’s contract as the basis of the agreement.
What results is not a technological question, but a business one. “I felt that our younger lawyers in particular didn’t feel empowered,” Lettie says. “They had no basis to say, ‘No, I’m not going to review that.’”
“We need to lean into the technology to solve that inefficiency because that is one of the most solvable problems that we have in contract management; but also, it doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t need to be a template that solves everything. Let’s make it good enough.”
In this case, she explains, tying contracting decisions to the business at large has helped her adopt a strong stance in dealing with the business. “There are certainly things you need to guard against, but honestly, if your non-disclosure is eight years versus three years, who knows, who cares?” she says, adding that it’s not worth an attorney’s time when they need to provide value to the business. “Reviewing an NDA is not any value to anybody.”
And it’s in these kind of human-centric decisions in which technology can play a valued-added role, especially as this technology continues to evolve. “There is no reason to even really be having that my paper/your paper discussion,” Lettie notes. Today, contract technology can take a template, turn it into a playbook, and put it against that third-party contract. “It comes in, it goes in the engine, you get a comparison, you sign it, or you don’t, and you move on with your day. It shouldn’t take longer than 30 minutes.”
Brown agrees, noting that in evaluating solutions, he comes back to the question: “What do I want my lawyers to be working on? Working on a multi-million-dollar M&A deal, or working on a single paper?”
To help free up that time, JPMorgan Chase’s legal team has developed a suite of 11 GenAI models, most slated for knowledge management, but that can be used across entire product line. This process provides a host of new capabilities, such as the ability to ask direct questions about contracts and documents. “We built models that have data across all of our products and services globally,” Brown adds. “It makes for a more intelligent way for the solution to interact with our internal professionals.”
That scale of technology-build may not be right for every legal department; but both Lettie and Brown agree that legal departments should be thinking about not just what the technology can do, but how it fits into the overall collaborative team picture. Departments also need to examine their ability to accept failure if it does not work.
Brown tells a story from two years ago, about a contract vendor that had a fantastic pitch to solve a crucial problem, However, the in-house trial wasn’t going well. Rather than push forward unnecessarily, the in-house team decided to take a step back. “Thank god we did that,” Brown says, “because we were able to recover and prepare for the next wave, which was [Chat]GPT.”
The result is a lesson: The whole team needs to be on board to truly innovate. “Start small and fail fast,” Brown says today. “Do not be afraid to let leadership know that something’s not going right.”
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