By Megan Bradley, Senior Legal Counsel, Docusign.

In-house legal teams share some common pressure points: more contracts, more stakeholders, more urgency, all without additional headcount.

That’s why AI is getting real attention in the contract process. It can speed up first-pass review, catch deviations from standard terms, summarize drafts, and handle the repetitive work that slows teams down.

And as teams incorporate these new tools, legal’s most valuable contribution to AI adoption is building the systems that govern the work and defining how oversight looks from the start.

Historically, legal control has meant direct review. A contract came in, a lawyer looked at it, made a judgment call, and moved on to the next one.

That model remains important for high-risk work, but it doesn’t scale well when AI handles more routine steps in the workflow.

As more contracting tasks become automated, legal’s highest-value contribution shifts upstream. The work becomes less about touching every clause personally and more about designing the rules, approvals, and checkpoints that govern how work gets done. Once that logic is built into the workflow, the lawyer’s judgment does not disappear. Rather, it gets reused.

‘Escalate anything unusual’ is not a rule yet

A common instruction for an AI agent sounds something like this: handle the routine requests and escalate anything unusual.

Reasonable? Yes. Specific enough to run a workflow? Definitely not.…

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