How Legal Automation Maximises Efficiency, Productivity and Compliance

In-house legal teams are under mounting pressure to enhance efficiency, reduce operational costs, and deliver greater strategic value to their organisations.

The acceleration of AI-driven legal processes, increasing regulatory scrutiny, and heightened business expectations are transforming the role of legal departments and making legal automation mission-critical.

• 79% of law firm respondents anticipate that AI will have a high or transformational impact on their work within the next five years, reflecting growing recognition of AI as a game-changer in the legal profession.
• 79% of corporate law departments experienced a rise in legal matters over the past year, intensifying the demand for efficient compliance management.
• 75% of survey respondents said their corporate law departments are placing a high priority on using technology to simplify current processes and manual workflows.

Legal automation is essential for handling increasing workloads, ensuring compliance, and optimising vendor and contract management at scale.

Why legal teams must prioritise legal automation

Legal departments face a growing need to adapt to these developments or risk falling behind. This transformation is driven by:

• Regulatory Overload & Compliance Pressures: The increasing complexity of global regulations, including data protection laws, ESG mandates, and supply chain due diligence, demands greater vigilance from legal teams. Without automation, tracking compliance obligations manually becomes unsustainable, leading to higher risks of penalties and reputational damage.
• AI-Driven Disruption & Expectations for Faster Turnarounds: With AI and automation reshaping industries, legal teams are expected to accelerate contract negotiations, vendor risk assessments, and compliance reviews. Businesses now demand real-time legal support. Without automation, in-house counsels struggle with lengthy approval processes, delaying key commercial decisions and impacting revenue generation.
• Cost Pressures & Resource Constraints: CFOs must focus on cost reduction, leading them to scrutinise legal spend. Legal teams are under pressure to ‘do more with less’ - reducing external legal costs while maintaining quality and compliance. Manual processes waste valuable time on low-value tasks, leaving fewer resources for strategic risk advisory and business enablement.
• The Rise of Legal Operations (Legal Ops) & Tech-Led Transformation: The modernisation of legal functions through dedicated Legal Ops roles is accelerating, with a focus on process optimisation, standardisation, and legal tech adoption. However, without automation, legal teams remain stuck in reactive, manual workflows that limit their ability to drive efficiency and demonstrate ROI.

To stay competitive, legal teams must transition from reactive contract managers to proactive business enablers. Adopting legal automation software streamlines compliance tracking, enhances contract intelligence, and allows legal professionals to focus on strategic advisory rather than administrative burdens.

The challenges posed by manual contract management

Despite their evolving role, legal teams face persistent challenges that hinder efficiency and strategic impact. Without automation, these challenges often lead to increased stress, operational inefficiencies, and the inability to meet growing business expectations.

1. Growing Workloads & Data Complexity

The volume of contracts, compliance requirements, and vendor-related obligations continues to rise. Legal teams often find themselves buried under administrative tasks, leaving little time for strategic risk analysis and contract optimisation.

General Counsels anticipate a 25% increase in legal workloads over the next three years, while headcounts are projected to grow by only 3%, intensifying pressure on existing teams.

Without legal automation, tracking obligations, managing amendments and ensuring compliance become time-consuming, increasing the risk of missed deadlines and regulatory penalties.

2. Pressure to Improve Efficiency Under Cost Constraints

Business leaders demand faster contract turnaround times while keeping legal headcounts stagnant. In-house counsels must navigate the paradox of achieving more with fewer resources, leading to longer hours, increased stress, and burnout.

Manual processes exacerbate this issue, causing bottlenecks that delay vendor onboarding, procurement approvals, and deal closures, ultimately impacting business performance.

3. Limited Adoption of Legal Tech & Process Bottlenecks

Many legal teams still rely on outdated systems, shared drives, and email threads to manage critical workflows. These fragmented processes lead to version control issues, duplicated efforts, and difficulties in retrieving key contract data.

Despite the potential benefits, only 40% of legal departments currently utilise AI for tasks such as document analysis, indicating significant room for growth in technology adoption.Manual approaches leave legal professionals to spend valuable time searching for contract clauses and ensuring compliance manually - tasks that could be streamlined through legal automation.

4. Regulatory Uncertainty & Risk Exposure

As regulatory requirements evolve, legal teams must constantly update processes to remain compliant. Relying on manual contract reviews and spreadsheet tracking makes it difficult to ensure full adherence to industry regulations, creating potential legal and financial liabilities for the business.

Without modern legal automation, in-house teams struggle to keep up with these demands, often reacting to issues rather than proactively managing risk and optimising processes.

Automation not only alleviates administrative burdens but also empowers legal teams to operate more strategically, reducing stress and ensuring they can add meaningful value to the business.

The Benefits of Legal Automation

Legal automation is a fundamental shift in how in-house legal teams operate, unlocking efficiency gains, reducing risk, and driving strategic impact. With legal teams under increasing pressure to deliver results with fewer resources, automation is no longer a luxury but a necessity for scaling operations effectively.

• Eliminating Repetitive Administrative Tasks: In-house legal teams often spend significant portions of their day on manual contract reviews, approval workflows, and compliance tracking. By automating these routine tasks, legal professionals can redirect their time to high-value strategic work, such as risk mitigation and contract negotiations.
• Ensuring Accuracy & Reducing Risk: Manual processes introduce the risk of human error, particularly in contract management and compliance tracking. AI-powered automation ensures that contracts remain aligned with regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of costly disputes and penalties.
• Increasing Speed & Business Responsiveness: Business leaders expect legal teams to keep pace with commercial demands. Automation accelerates contract approvals, vendor due diligence, and compliance reviews, reducing bottlenecks that can slow down procurement and revenue-generating activities.
• Enhancing Cross-Department Collaboration: Legal automation centralises key processes, ensuring that legal, procurement, and finance teams have real-time access to the same information. This eliminates inefficiencies caused by miscommunication, lost documents, and siloed working methods.
• Supporting Scalable Legal Operations: As organisations grow, legal complexity increases. Without automation, legal teams struggle to keep up with expanding vendor relationships, regulatory updates, and contract volumes. Automated legal workflows provide the structure necessary to manage legal operations at scale

By embracing contract automation, legal teams not only reduce operational inefficiencies but also alleviate workplace stress caused by overwhelming workloads, enabling them to deliver more value to their organisations.

How to deliver business value with legal automation 

Gatekeeper provides a Vendor & Contract Lifecycle Management (VCLM) platform designed to solve the critical challenges faced by in-house legal teams.

Rather than just digitialisng processes, Gatekeeper optimises vendor and contract oversight to improve compliance, mitigate risk, and provide legal teams with greater control over their workflows.

1. Accelerating Contract Approvals & Reducing Bottlenecks: Manual contract workflows slow down procurement and business decisions. Gatekeeper automates approval workflows, obligation tracking, and renewal notifications to ensure legal teams remain agile and responsive.
2. Enhancing Compliance & Risk Visibility: Legal teams face increasing regulatory scrutiny. Gatekeeper’s AI-powered data extraction and contract summaries allow Legal teams to easily find relevant clauses, helping teams ensure all contracts meet legal and policy standards without manual intervention.
3. Reducing Time Spent on Administrative Tasks: Lawyers often waste hours searching for contracts, tracking obligations, and handling renewals manually. Gatekeeper’s centralised contract repository and automated workflows eliminate inefficiencies, freeing legal professionals to focus on high-value strategic work.
4. Improving Collaboration Across Departments: Legal doesn’t operate in isolation - procurement, finance, and legal teams must work together seamlessly. Gatekeeper connects departments through a unified platform, ensuring everyone has access to real-time contract data and reducing misalignment.
5. Enabling Scalable Legal Operations: As organisations grow, contract complexity increases. Without automation, legal teams struggle to manage expanding vendor relationships and contractual obligations. Gatekeeper’s VCLM approach ensures legal teams can scale operations efficiently and cost-effectively while maintaining control over contract governance.

Case Study: BlaBlaCar’s Legal Transformation with Gatekeeper

BlaBlaCar, a global carpooling network, needed a scalable and efficient contract management system to streamline vendor relationships and ensure compliance across multiple regions. The company struggled with manual contract tracking, decentralised processes, and a lack of visibility over key obligations.

By implementing Gatekeeper’s VCLM solution, BlaBlaCar achieved:

• A centralised contract repository: This provided full visibility over contracts across teams and jurisdictions, improving governance and reducing administrative overhead.
• Automated reminders and tracking: BlaBlaCar eliminated the risk of missed renewals and compliance obligations by automating key contract milestones.
• Streamlined contract workflows: By automating contract approvals, renewals, and compliance tracking, BlaBlaCar significantly reduced administrative delays and ensured seamless contract execution across its global operations.

With Gatekeeper, BlaBlaCar used legal automation to transform its contract management processes, improving efficiency, reducing risk, and enabling its legal team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than administrative tasks.

The Future of Legal Automation in 2025 & Beyond

In 2025, legal automation will be a necessity, not a luxury, for in-house legal teams aiming to navigate increasing regulatory pressures and evolving business demands.

By leveraging AI-driven automation, legal departments can:

• Eliminate manual inefficiencies
• Reduce contract-related risks
• Deliver faster, more strategic legal insights

Gatekeeper’s VCLM platform empowers legal teams to stay ahead of compliance challenges, optimise contract oversight, and drive business value through intelligent automation.

To see how Gatekeeper can transform your legal operations, contact us today.