Tech-enabled, human-led

‘I'm originally from Hungary,’ Natali says. ‘I moved to the Netherlands to study law, completing two LLMs: one in European Private Law and another in International Technology Law, due to my passion for technology.’ 

‘In my role at Zeno, an AI-native legal platform, I bring together my legal experience with technical innovation,’ Natali explains. ‘A big part of my job is helping technology understand how lawyers think: having the output reflect real legal reasoning.’ She also works closely with users – legal professional and in-house teams - to align the product with how legal teams actually operate. ‘We start from the person, not from what the software assumes their workflow should be.’ 

In-house legal teams face two main challenges: the pressure to deliver both speed and precision while having limited resources. ‘In-house teams are often very small. They can even be solo counsel,’ Natali says. ‘And they face many responsibilities regarding compliance, contract reviews, crisis management and everything else within their daily work. They have to constantly switch between urgent work and strategic work. And strategic work is often sacrificed as a result.’  

This is where Natali sees the need to invest in streamlining processes. ‘I think it really boils down to tasks that are necessary but not producing the highest direct value. A lot of time can get lost digging through old contracts, emails, and shared information to find the specific clauses or legal information that is pressing for the business at that moment to answer particular questions. Checking the same requirements across contracts can also be repetitive and it is often not the most exciting part of the job. Standardizing these processes can free up a lot of time to plan new processes and try new tech.’ 

When legal teams are overloaded, businesses feel it. ‘They shift to survival mode. It leads to a focus on short-term tasks and quick responses at the expense of long-term clarity and business agility,’ Natali explains. ‘Turnaround times for contracts lengthen, deal negotiations slow down and people inside the business will have to wait longer for advice. If the in-house counsel doesn't have time, they can triage priority and lower-priority tasks might not be addressed.’

There are numerous legal tech tools available on the market. ‘I think one of the most relevant would be contract review and analysis,’ Natali says. ‘One of the clearest wins for legal tech is how it can speed up contract reviews and also reviewing routine contracts by comparing them to known standards automatically. AI tools can rapidly scan agreements for key clauses, deviations from a company’s standard policy, identifying ambiguity and extracting key information without you having to read every page line by line. So for instance, if you’re using a contract analysis tool, an in-house counsel can upload a draft contract and get back a summary of critical points and problematic terms within minutes. AI will also flag deviations from the company’s standard policy to ensure consistency.’

The added value or business case is quite clear for in-house counsel, but how do you convince the leadership team and colleagues to adopt legal tech? Especially if there is skepticism, hesitation and/or trust issues. ‘I think this can be addressed in two ways. First, don’t keep talking about it, just do it. Start with a pilot and focus on quick wins because it’s much easier to build buy-in when you can demonstrate success on a small scale,’ Natali explains. ‘Consider piloting a legal tech tool for a specific use case. Then you can track the results of how much time we have saved, how many contracts we can process, and how satisfied our team members are with this. Then, share those wins with the key stakeholders or with the board. From my own experience, I’ve seen that small victories are the ones that help convert skeptics into supporters of new AI tools.’

‘For those who are extremely skeptical, I would advise to start really small. Have them use AI outside of work, just to get comfortable with it. For example, have them use a general AI solution like ChatGPT and let them compile a grocery list. It doesn’t involve any legal information, but they can see the value of AI as an assistant.’

‘Approaching the use of AI tools like this makes it easier to build confidence in the technology. Piloting is quite low-commitment and low-risk, and if you keep an open mind, recognizing that there’s a learning curve and expectation management is necessary - then the pilot can really pay off into organizational buy-in.’  

Second, it’s important to translate legal tech benefits into business value. Legal tech is often not seen as a revenue-generating engine, but if you start to position it as such and point out what the benefit is for the entire business from implementing legal tech, it’s easier to get support. If you tie the tech to the company’s broader goals – have faster deals, fewer costly errors, improved efficiencies – then it’s seen as a business enabler and not like a luxury for the legal team to have.’