This is the final blog of a five-part series on CLM Adoption in the Age of AI. Read the first blog here.
As generative AI reshapes the business world, corporate legal teams must reevaluate their approach to contract lifecycle management. While budget and resourcing constraints are nothing new, the pressure to leverage technology—particularly genAI—to operate more efficiently and cost effectively has never been greater.
For some organizations looking to enhance their CLM technology with AI tools, challenges to adopting and implementing new technology can seem insurmountable. Based on what we have seen working with corporate legal teams and law firms, these may include:
- Lack of in-house genAI expertise
- Struggle to select the right solution from among the vast and growing number of choices
- Cost of new tool onboarding and training
Adopting a “tech-as-a-service” approach with a trusted Alternative Legal Service Provider (ALSP) addresses these concerns. Providers, like Integreon, bring you an AI-enabled solution with a trained staff to operate the environment and experienced professionals that can tailor the AI performance to your specific requirements. Whether you need drafting and redline review capabilities or analysis of your repository of agreements, your ALSP partner allows you to immediately launch the benefits of AI without the upfront costs and risks.
Besides lowered risk and less cost, there are other benefits to deploying AI through a “tech as a service” solution:
- Access to specialized talent: Avoid the time and effort of recruiting and training new employees who have the requisite skillsets. Instead, simply deploy those skilled resources through your ALSP.
- Contracting process and workflow experience: Subject matter experts from an ALSP have the benefit of working alongside companies across a multitude of industries with a myriad of contracting challenges. They can apply this experience to your unique situation.
- Expert configuration of genAI modules: an ALSP will be adept in making sure you are taking advantage of all of a tool’s capabilities and fitting them to your requirements.
- Test and Learn: ALSPs allow you to experiment with emerging AI technologies on a smaller scale before fully committing to a single investment.
- Curated tech stack: An ALSP’s solutions are fine tuned to optimize the tech tools they use. Suitability and testing have been handled for
- Strategic partnership: An experienced yet nimble ALSP continues to innovate and stay on top of technology advancements while balancing new capabilities against operational effectiveness.
Post Implementation Tips
Your new CLM tool is not a “one and done” deployment. Ongoing attention to vendor feature updates and evolving user requirements is required. The value from your tool will continue to grow if you:
- Stay current with vendor system releases and incorporate new features into your processes. That means continuing to train your users so they can take advantage of the system’s expanding capabilities.
- When incorporating genAI, keep updating your background prompts to ensure your output performance continues to be refined and kept current with evolving requirements. Reporting will also need to be updated to capture insights available from new activities.
Usage policies and training
A final consideration for long-term implementation success with genAI-enhanced tools: establish clear usage policies and ample training.
Thomson Reuters’ Generative AI in Professional Services survey found that 52% of respondents have no genAI policies, while 64% have received no real training. Training in skills like prompt engineering, along with guardrails around genAI’s appropriate use and limitations, is essential for effective user adoption. A Risk Framework such as that available from RAILS (Responsible AI in Legal Services) offers a useful starting point for legal teams seeking to understand how to assess genAI implementation risks and set meaningful policy to enable adoption. It is also important to keep a watchful eye for where a “human-in-the-loop” is critical to police the genAI contributions and assure value is achieved through accuracy and integrity.
Lastly, supplement your team with genAI experts with hands-on commercial contract work experience. An Alternative Legal Service Provider (ALSP) can help you maintain your CLM platform output and train your AI output and train your AI models for long-term success.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can effectively evaluate, adopt, and optimize CLM technology in 2025, especially given the new dimension genAI creates for this class of legal tech, download our eBook, “A Legal Department’s Guide to CLM Adoption in the Age of AI.”
