The sharpest in-house legal professionals know that efficiency and collaboration are essential for getting ahead and keeping pace in 2025.
As companies rely on their in-house teams, you have the opportunity to showcase your skills and deliver great results. Considering the numerous departments you collaborate with, the diverse range of issues you tackle, and the constant influx of requests — all while facing heightened pressure to deliver results and demonstrate value — organizing workflows and standardizing processes is crucial for success.
This involves examining your current processes closely to identify what has been effective in the past, and determining where adjustments may be necessary.
We've compiled a list of in-house best practices for your team to implement and refine. This guide outlines what to start, stop, or maintain, along with the reasons – and resources you may need – for each practical step for execution.
Here’s your start, stop, keep list for 2025.
Start
Auditing your contracts
What: As the regulatory landscape shifts and business priorities change, staying on top of what’s inside your contracts helps you maintain compliance. An audit uncovers business-critical information that protects you from risk and contributes to your bottom line. For example, in light of the artificial intelligence (AI) governance legislation being enacted in various states, you can run an audit to evaluate data and security compliance across your contracts for systems leveraging AI, and update accordingly.
Why: Conducting regular contract audits helps you manage risk — keep tabs on risk markers, liabilities, and reporting obligations — and business priorities like auto-renewal terms, vendor agreements, and revenue flow. By knowing what’s inside your contracts, your team can be more proactive in addressing legal issues, instead of playing catch-up later on.
How: Use contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to conduct regular contract audits. CLM enables you to build internal processes and controls that comply with regulations and provides an audit trail that tracks a contract’s lifecycle. LinkSquares Analyze, for example, allows your team to run regular audits and generate reports on your findings.
Planning your AI governance response
What: On a related note, the rapid evolution of AI capabilities and regulations means organizations need to be prepared for unexpected AI-related incidents or compliance changes. Rather than reacting ad-hoc in a frenzy to AI governance challenges, organizations need an AI incident command center they can rely on. This command center should be armed with a tactical AI governance response plan that enables your cross-functional teams to understand current AI risk exposure and prepare for potential scenarios, from model bias incidents to regulatory shifts.
Why: During an AI-related incident — whether it's discovered model bias, data privacy breaches, or unexpected AI outputs — trying to coordinate a response while managing stakeholder concerns can lead to rushed decisions increasing the margin for human error and data disruption. Without preparation, teams may struggle to gather necessary documentation, understand model lineage, or demonstrate compliance measures. A well-structured AI governance response plan allows teams to act methodically, protect stakeholder interests, and maintain operational continuity while addressing the issue.
How: Collaborate with cross-functional team members to form an AI governance response team and command center that will map your AI system inventory, including associated risk levels, and build out an AI governance response plan for common or likely AI-related incidents (e.g. bias detection, security breaches, regulatory inquiries). This command center can leverage CLM software to centralize and quickly access:
- AI model documentation and testing results
- Data processing agreements
- Vendor AI capabilities assessments
- AI ethics policies and procedures
- Regulatory compliance documentation
Stop
In 2025, efficiency is the key to staying ahead. Outdated, manual processes can hold your team back. Want to boost productivity and make a bigger impact? Start by looking at where your team might be stuck—like using inboxes to manage tasks, relying on manual workflows, or guessing when accurate data is essential. Small changes can lead to big improvements.
Using manual processes
What: A manual process is one you complete by hand, step by step. For example, entering contract data into a spreadsheet every single time you perform a task, drafting each new NDA from scratch, or copying Salesforce data and pasting it into your CLM. These are all manual processes, and they take up a lot of your valuable time.
Why: Manual tasks are the enemy of in-house legal productivity. They slow you down and increase the likelihood of mistakes. Plus, it’s extremely difficult to gather useful data through manual processes. Doing things manually isn’t a strategic use of your time, as it keeps you from driving other initiatives that impact the business and provide quantifiable value.
How: Replace your manual processes with legal technology. Modern businesses are far more productive when they use technology to automate the tedium. With technology, you accomplish more in less time and with greater accuracy, and have access to the reporting insights that legal technology provides. For instance, CLM allows you to automate pre-signature tasks and generate post-execution insights into how well you follow in-house best practices.
Using your inbox for task management
What: As a strategic business partner,, you’re no stranger to handling requests from across the business. This often means sifting through countless emails, making sense of them, following up, and tracking progress to completion. It can also mean jumping between multiple tools to gather everything you need to get the job done. For teams in high-growth companies, managing incoming requests can take more time than actually completing the work.
Why: Tracking everything through your inbox opens up cracks for important requests to fall through, causing delays on important initiatives for the business. It’s easy for things to get lost in your inbox, especially one-off documents or approvals from years back. This causes bottlenecks and impedes your ability to provide timely and consistent value to the business.
How: Use legal project management tools to centralize legal intake and task management. LinkSquares Prioritize, for example, allows you to manage legal intake and follow through on tasks in a single platform. This way, you can track tasks more effectively and deliver on promised value to your cross-functional collaborators, becoming a more consistent business partner.
Guessing
What: Without data, legal teams are left to guess what resources you need, what you’ve accomplished over the last year, or how long it takes to turn around an agreement. Guessing is the Achilles’ heel of the in-house legal department, making you unreliable in the eyes of your collaborators and unable to advocate for the resources you really need.
Why: A gut feeling is helpful for every lawyer to have. It can give you a sense of the right direction to go in and a general understanding of what you need to do. But guessing or going off gut can have you leading your team astray. Instead of guessing, use data to back up your requests for additional headcount, acquiring technology, and increasing budget.
How: An end-to-end CLM solution like LinkSquares has powerful analytics that provide insights into your performance and the effectiveness of your processes. With AI contract analytics, a contract repository, and a reporting dashboard, this tool enables legal teams to pull reports to justify needing more resources. Define, track, and measure KPIs that are meaningful to your team and use those in conversations with the rest of the business.
Keep optimizing, testing, and iterating
Thanks to the larger role that legal operations is playing, many in-house teams have standard workflows, processes, and KPIs. Here are some efficiency-maximizing tasks to keep and continue optimizing in 2025.
Contract workflows
What: Workflows are the collection of start-to-finish steps that make up a legal process. For example, teams can have workflows for reviewing marketing material, updating website terms of service, and enabling self-service NDAs.
Why: Workflows streamline your process and ensure consistency across execution. Optimizing your workflows allows you to consistently scale your processes to adapt to the changes in business conditions.
How: Use a CLM tool to implement and streamline common contract workflows for your organization. With this kind of comprehensive technology, you can set up automations to require less lawyer intervention in lower-value contracts or tasks that don’t drive revenue. You can also create an internal playbook that enables the rest of your team to execute their part. Be sure to update your workflows as your team scales.
Legal intake
What: A well-organized intake process is crucial to strong execution and quite difficult without the right tools. During intake, your team collects as much information about the request as possible and, if needed, goes back to the requestor for additional information. An effective intake process is centralized, gives requesters the ability to attach pertinent information, and asks the right questions so you can quickly execute the task.
Why: A well-structured legal intake process helps you build your brand as a team that your business can depend on. It allows you to organize, prioritize, and assign your legal requests, increasing the chances of successful execution. A sound legal intake process improves your reputation as an enabler of business.
How: Take your intake to the next level with an intake and task management solution like Prioritize. Using technology to supplement your process gives you the superpower of being able to make your intake process a strategic advantage. The best part is knowing that it was built with legal — and therefore, compliance — in mind.
Monitoring metrics and KPIs to drive continuous improvement and innovation
What: Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurements of success that legal teams use to track progress and demonstrate value. Some legal teams track volume, timing, or people metrics to understand how they are performing against goals. KPIs should be meaningful, demonstrate value, identify opportunities and bottlenecks, and be data-driven.
Why: KPIs and metrics allow legal teams to show up to business discussions at the same level as other business units. These measurements can also provide visibility into how your team divides their time, advocate for more resources, and help you step confidently into the future. Additionally, they enable you to test theories, gather data to prove or refine them, and iterate on strategies for continuous improvement.
How: Use technology to collect key metrics and data. With CLM software, you can track individual team members’ output, performance, and success rates. You can also use dashboards to visualize the data and present it to company leadership in a meaningful way.
Get it done with LinkSquares
This year will require legal teams to be more efficient than they’ve ever been. This means manual processes, inbox management, and guessing must go in 2025. To make this year your most productive yet, collaborate with your team to optimize key workflows, processes, and analytics using LinkSquares. And if you haven’t already, start tracking legal matters, auditing your contracts, and planning your crisis response.
Legal technology makes carrying out in-house best practices even easier, and helps operationalize your start, stop, keep list. Legal project management tools help you track intake and task execution, and CLM helps you to automate every aspect of the contract lifecycle. Start the year off right by improving your productivity and efficiency so you can expertly navigate the uncertain waters. See a demo of LinkSquares today.