Contracts sit at the heart of a business, the commitments, obligations, and risks the company has agreed to live within them. Historically, that contract data sat tucked away. Technically available, but manually managed and not really usable at any real scale. Finding information often meant manual review, sometimes contract by contract. This left little room for legal teams to proactively leverage the data available to them and make informed, strategic recommendations and decisions. 

While Legal has always had the access to the contract data, Legal can now act on this data proactively with the use of AI (particularly tools like LinkSquares). The advancements in contract intelligence, especially in the age of AI, allow Legal teams to surface and analyze that same contract data in minutes instead of weeks, more aligned with the speed the business moves.

I talked through that shift recently in a session called "The Evolution of Contract Intelligence," and the conversation kept coming back to one idea: to be a true business driver, Legal needs to show up to the table with data prepared to make strategic recommendations in support of business goals. Here's what that actually looks like in practice.

1. Anticipating What’s Ahead

The legal teams that earn a seat at the table as a strategic partner are the ones who can anticipate what is coming, understand how it fits into the company’s goals, and make informed recommendations to propel the business forward. Structured contract data that can be surfaced through the use of AI makes that possible: identifying the upcoming vendor renewals with functionality overlap or which parties need to be notified of an address change. Instead of reactively searching when asked, the legal team can come prepared to meetings with an impact assessment based on the data available to them.

2. Understanding How Legal Fits In

In order to be a strategic partner, Legal must understand what other departments are trying to accomplish and find how legal fits into these goals. A couple of years ago, we began tracking Legal’s impact on new business sales: overall pipeline forecast, the status of each deal worked by Legal, and the percentage of new business revenue that ran through Legal each month. That visibility has shifted Legal from a reactive contract reviewer into a proactive revenue facilitator. Legal is reaching out to Sales about potential opportunities not yet routed through the department and providing input on the forecast numbers. This visibility and partnership builds both trust and a shared stake in the outcome. 

3. Tracking What You’ll Actually Use

Being a data-driven legal department does not mean tracking every data point possible. Every field you track should have purpose and be easy to extract and report on. Earlier in my career, I thought free-text fields gave the business flexibility to provide feedback. It was only when I sat down to report on the output that I realized what I actually had: thousands of lines of text to comb through to gain any real insights. The legal teams that use contract data strategically are deliberate about what they track and how so that they can turn data into actionable insights within minutes.  

4. Validate Before You Scale

Legal doesn’t earn a seat at the table by showing up with data that doesn't hold up. It’s not about the quantity of data, it's about bringing data and recommendations that help the business meet their goals and that the business can trust. That trust comes from an understanding that Legal has consistent, and accurate, data. Legal must understand what each value reported means, validating the data against this definition and maintaining it on a go-forward basis. That used to be a time-consuming manual process. AI enhances Legal’s ability to perform this work, allowing Legal to manage and report on more values at scale.  

5. Data Drives Operational Efficiency and Consistency in Legal Support

Data and AI allows legal to create the resources, such as fall-back contract provisions or playbooks, more efficiently. These resources are the building blocks to empowering legal teams to make autonomous decisions in a consistent way. Playbooks built on consistent, structured data give every reviewer the same fallback positions and guardrails, regardless of who's negotiating. That consistency also creates an improved internal business experience: if every negotiator holds the same line, the team understands what the guardrails are and can help support Legal in negotiating through those positions as part of the deal cycle.

The Bottom Line

The teams treated like strategic partners aren't the busiest ones. They're the ones who show up prepared to make actionable, data-backed recommendations that further company goals. The data was always there. What's changed is what Legal does with it.

See more insights from the webinar here.

Written by: Ashlyn Donohue, Sr. Director of Legal, LinkSquares