Three More Practical Ways to Optimise Legal Operations Without Growing Your Legal Team

Hannah Price Harries, one of our automation lawyers, reflects on her time in-house with the benefit of 7 years experience delivering legal technology solutions as part of the echo team.

Traditional in-house legal work is shaped by manual processes, overflowing inboxes and the constant pressure to deliver more with less. Transforming in-house legal teams by applying legal operations principles isn’t just about efficiency – it’s about fundamentally changing the way legal services can be delivered to business functions.

The points covered in this series aren’t intended to be six separate technology projects. Each one removes friction from the legal team, but together they create a legal function that scales alongside business needs without doubling headcount.

Why Legal Operations matters – regardless the size of the legal team

In-house legal teams are facing the same challenge: increasing demand without increasing headcount. They are expected to support more contracts, respond faster to the business, manage greater regulatory complexity and demonstrate measurable value – all while controlling costs.

For smaller legal teams, simply working harder isn’t sustainable. The biggest gains come from improving legal workflows, removing unnecessary manual effort and introducing technology where it genuinely improves outcomes.

That’s why legal operations has become such an important discipline. It isn’t just about software; it’s about designing processes that allow lawyers to spend more time on strategic advice and less time on administration.

In this series I explore ways the core parts of my former in-house role could be transformed today and the kinds of AI and Legal Technology tools I would now reach for to handle them. Part 1 looked at setting the groundwork and focused on:

matter management – creating a single source of truth for every matter
legal intake – moving away from firefighting an inbox
routine communications – automating the administration not the lawyer.

Here are three more areas where I believe modern legal operations can transform the way in-house legal teams work:

4. Accelerate Legal Research with AI

I used to spend hours trying to find the right answer.

Legal research meant spending hours trawling through Practical Law, Westlaw and textbooks to identify relevant authorities and commentary, to piece together a research memorandum or note of advice.

How I would handle this work in the AI age:

Speed up research: Use AI‑assisted research tools to summarise authorities, compare jurisdictions, and produce structured notes in moments.
Targeted explanations: Deploy conversational research assistants to explain legal concepts, identify relevant issues and suggest areas for further investigation, supported by citations and source references.
Speed up risk identification: Use tools like CoCounsel or Spellbook to review documents, extract key issues and highlight risks at speed.
Minimise drafting from scratch: Generate first drafts of advice notes and research summaries automatically, then refine them with my own judgement, analysis and commercial context.

Research would become a strategic exercise focused on analysis, validation and judgement rather than a time‑consuming search for information.

Instead of time spent finding the answers, I would spend it validating and applying judgement based on business strategy.

5. Streamline Procurement and Supplier Processes

Supporting procurement and supplier onboarding often required completing data processing agreements, anti-slavery questionnaires and other compliance documentation manually.

Much of the information already existed within the organisation, but lawyers and procurement teams still spent considerable time locating, validating and re-entering the same information across multiple requests.

How I would handle this work in the AI age:

Create standard positions: Maintain AI-enabled playbooks containing approved positions, standard responses and escalation pathways for common supplier queries.
Re-use organisational data: Use auto-population tools to complete supplier questionnaires using existing organisational data, reducing repetitive manual effort and improving consistency.
Democratise work out of legal: Enable procurement teams to access self-service tools for low-risk documents and standard compliance responses, within pre-approved parameters.
Identify high-risk issues: Use workflow automation to identify exceptions, route higher-risk issues to Legal and track progress through to completion.

Legal oversight would remain, but much of the administrative effort associated with routine supplier onboarding and compliance activity could be automated, allowing lawyers to focus on issues requiring judgement and risk assessment.

5. Modernise Contract Negotiation and Review

Negotiating leases across a large property portfolio was traditionally a labour-intensive process.

As an in-house lawyer, I would spend significant time reviewing draft agreements, identifying deviations from precedent positions, assessing risk and evaluating the commercial impact of proposed terms.

If I were Head or Legal or GC now, I’d stop reviewing every contract from scratch.

How I would handle this work in the AI age:

Consistent starting points: Use approved templates for any first drafts to ensure consistency (ideally from a document automation system than ensures guardrails are applied while significantly reducing drafting time).
Automated review against standards: Use AI-assisted review tools to compare draft leases against approved playbooks and suggest alternative wording aligned to the organisation’s preferred positions.
Automated redlines: Rely on automated redlining to identify deviations from standard terms instantly, reducing time spent on manual document comparisons.
Faster risk flagging: Use contract risk analysis tools to flag clauses requiring further scrutiny or escalation, enabling legal effort to be directed where it adds the most value.
Strategic modelling: Model the commercial impact of key provisions – such as rent reviews, break rights, service charge caps and repair obligations – in minutes rather than hours.
Improved negotiation strategy: Draw on insights from previous negotiations across the portfolio to help inform negotiation strategy and maintain consistency.

Negotiations would become faster, more consistent and more closely aligned with the organisation’s commercial objectives and risk appetite, while leaving lawyers free to focus on strategy, judgement and relationship management.

A Profession on the Brink of Reinvention

Looking back, I don’t think the biggest transformation would come from AI or other Legal Technology tools themselves.

It would come from redesigning the way legal work flows through the organisation.

Better legal operations means removing unnecessary effort, improving visibility, empowering the business through self-service and allowing lawyers to focus on judgement rather than administration.

For organisations, the future of legal is digital and data‑driven. For lawyers, it’s an opportunity to redefine our value and focus on what truly matters: judgement, strategy, and partnership with the business.

Having worked both as an in-house lawyer and now as a legal technologist, I’ve seen first-hand how the combination of process improvement and the right legal technology can transform even the smallest legal teams: I’ve lived the ‘old way,’ and I know just how transformative the ‘new way’ can be.

That’s why successful legal transformation doesn’t start with software.

It starts with understanding how legal work really gets done.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are legal operations?

Legal operations looks at ways to improve how legal services are delivered within an organisation. It looks at the best way to combine the people, processes, technology and data to help manage legal work more efficiently and allows legal teams to demonstrate greater value to the business.

Running efficient legal operations is strategically important for all legal teams. Even smaller legal teams, who don’t necessarily a need a dedicated Legal Operation function, can benefit from looking at more efficient processes for the way work flows through the department so lawyers can focus on the work that really requires their expertise.

What legal work should be automated first?

Every organisation is different, but there are common areas where automation can make an immediate impact.

These often include legal intake, document drafting, contract review, supplier onboarding, approval workflows, standard correspondence and matter management. The best candidates are typically high-volume, repeatable activities that follow consistent business rules while still allowing lawyers to step in when judgement is needed.

How can AI help General Counsel?

AI is best viewed as an assistant rather than a replacement.

It can help summarise documents, review contracts, identify risks, draft routine communications, surface key information and support legal research. This reduces time spent on repetitive tasks and gives lawyers more opportunity to focus on strategic advice, commercial decision-making and managing legal risk.

Ultimately, AI enhances legal judgement-it doesn’t replace it.

At echo.legal we work with legal teams to understand how work flows through the business. Our lawyers and legal technologists help teams to map current processes, identify areas of automation and make your legal technology work smarter for your organisation.