- Legal teams are increasingly adopting governed AI solutions to manage rising complexity, fragmented data, and evolving regulations—helping them move faster, reduce risk, and maintain compliance without compromising security or control.
- When built on a secure, permission-aware foundation, AI can streamline core legal workflows — like intake, context gathering, contract review, and regulatory tracking — by connecting knowledge across systems, automating manual work, and delivering reliable, auditable results.
- The most successful legal teams start small and scale thoughtfully. By focusing on targeted workflows, integrating essential data sources, and prioritizing governance, they achieve faster cycle times, stronger compliance, and measurable cost savings.
Legal teams sit at the center of every major business decision, guiding growth while protecting against risk. They’re expected to move quickly, manage rising complexity, and maintain compliance across an evolving regulatory landscape.
Meeting this mandate takes more than adding headcount or another tool. Legal teams need a unified system that connects the contracts, playbooks, policies, and institutional knowledge they rely on while preserving the security, privacy, and trust the rest of the organization depends on.
In this blog, we’ll explore how AI, when built on a governed foundation that protects data and enforces existing permissions, is reshaping how legal teams operate day to day.
Why legal is leaning into AI
Legal teams today are managing more than ever. More contracts than last quarter. More privacy questionnaires. More Slack messages asking "quick question about this NDA?" Work is scattered across document management systems, contract lifecycle management platforms, email, chat, wikis, and shared drives. That fragmentation slows turnaround times and leads to inconsistent results.
At the same time, the legal landscape is changing. Regulations continue to evolve and add further complexity, including both established regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, and more recent ones including CCPA/CPRA, and NIS2/DORA. To cap it off, new AI governance laws such as the EU AI Act and a variety of US State laws further muddy the waters. Keeping policies, templates, and guidance aligned across these frameworks requires ongoing monitoring and cross-functional coordination.
Many teams have experimented with AI to keep up, but most encounter the same challenges: fragmented data, disconnected tools, and unresolved questions around data security. When unapproved AI tools enter the workflow, they introduce “shadow AI,” exposing sensitive information to systems outside the company’s control, as well as potential security concerns.
To move forward safely, legal needs a governed approach. AI must be permission-aware, auditable, and grounded in the organization’s own knowledge base. It should draw only from verified sources, respect access controls, and deliver traceable, defensible answers that legal teams can rely on.
That’s where Glean comes in. Glean connects a department’s knowledge across its existing tools, bringing together contracts, playbooks, and prior work in one secure, searchable experience. Every result is grounded in verified company data, governed by real-time permissions, and presented with full context, helping legal teams move faster with confidence and control.
How AI is changing legal work
AI is reshaping how legal teams operate by giving attorneys, paralegals, and legal ops teams more time to focus on the work that requires judgment and experience. When grounded in governance and connected to the right data, AI helps teams manage growing workloads without compromising diligence or control.
Most matters start the same way: a request comes in from internal clients, you gather context, review documents (e.g. contracts, guidelines, policies), seek input, make decisions, and record the outcome. The steps haven't changed, but the pace and precision have.
Intake and triage
AI can help legal teams capture incoming requests, route them appropriately, and surface similar matters automatically. Instead of sorting through inboxes or ticket queues, legal teams can see related work and set expectations early, making sure requests don’t stall before they start.
Gathering context
The most time-consuming step in any legal process is finding what’s already been done. AI reduces that effort by connecting information scattered across tools and departments, as well as emails, documents, drives, call notes, and chats. Legal team members can quickly find prior contracts, guidance, or correspondence without jumping between systems.
Review and negotiation
During review, AI helps legal team members identify relevant precedents and compare language across documents. It can highlight deviations from standard terms or flag potential risks, reducing manual effort while keeping reviews consistent across the team.
Finalize and record
When it's time to finalize the agreement, AI helps teams ensure the right version moves forward and that nothing falls through the cracks. It can support version control, link executed documents to their matters, and capture key obligations for tracking, reducing the chance of missed deadlines or uncompleted tasks.
Monitor and report
Once work is complete, AI turns activity data into insight. Legal can monitor cycle times, identify bottlenecks, and track outside counsel spend and usage by matter type to help teams quantify their impact, save costs, and continuously improve.
Together, these shifts show how AI can remove friction from everyday legal work, streamlining processes that once relied on manual effort and institutional memory alone.
How Glean helps legal teams
For most legal departments, the challenge isn’t defining what “good” looks like. It’s finding a way to make it work safely and reliably, and horizontally across all data sources. Glean provides the governed foundation that turns these ideas into practice, connecting systems, knowledge, and people so legal can move faster while controlling risk, all while preserving permissions and confidentiality.
A single, governed source of truth
Legal data lives across many systems. Glean brings that information together into a single, unified search experience while mirroring existing access permissions in real time.
Knowledge in context
Reliable AI starts with reliable data. Glean grounds every answer in your company’s verified data, citing exactly where information comes from, whether it’s a clause in a contract, a policy in the handbook, or notes from a past negotiation. That transparency builds confidence and helps teams keep pace as regulations evolve.
Workflows that build on prior work
Glean helps legal teams reuse what's already been approved by connecting related matters, retrieving prior contracts and playbooks, and drawing on prior negotiations and responses for due diligence questionnaires (DDQs) and requests for proposals (RFPs). The result is faster reviews with more consistent positions across contract, vendor, and policy workflows.
Built-in governance
Every search, draft, and recommendation operates within enterprise controls. Glean mirrors your existing permissions and produces auditable, verifiable outputs.
The impact goes beyond just efficiency. With Glean, legal teams can trust that their answers and drafts reflect the company’s verified knowledge, current regulations, and established controls. That reliability gives teams the confidence to move faster while continuing to protect the business.
Where legal teams are seeing results
AI works best for legal teams when they start small, focusing on workflows with measurable outcomes and clear governance boundaries. Two recent examples from Glean customers show what’s possible when AI is applied responsibly in legal departments: one centered on contract review and redlining, the other on regulatory and policy tracking.
Contract review and redlining
A leading investment management company used Glean Search and a Deal Status Agent to reduce time spent locating deal materials and preparing for review. The company was able to cut legal search time by more than 40 hours per month and saw a 33% reduction in prep meetings.
Glean can connect to your CLM to bring approved language, templates, playbooks and negotiation history into a single workspace. Using AI-powered comparison tools, Glean flags non-standard clauses and suggests fallback language.
By grounding answers in the company’s data and mirroring existing permissions, Glean ensures each recommendation is auditable, permissions-aware, and backed by precedent.
Regulatory and policy tracking
A publicly traded oil and gas company used Glean Collections and a Pre-Read Legal Agent to streamline policy reviews and pre-meeting prep. The company saved 6 hours per lawyer each week and reduced outside counsel costs by $84,000 annually.
Glean connects policy documents, regulatory guidance, and supporting evidence across systems so teams can track changes, summarize new requirements, identify compliance gaps, and generate audit-ready reports with full citations.
As privacy, data protection, and AI governance frameworks continue to evolve, this workflow helps legal teams achieve both efficiency and defensibility.
Laying the foundation for measurable success
AI transformation doesn’t happen all at once. The goal isn't to scale on day one; it’s to build repeatability, trust, and visible impact. Start small, prove value, then expand with governed workflows and measurable outcomes.
1. Start with one workflow
Choose a high-volume, high-friction process like contract review or privacy questionnaires. These use cases deliver quick time savings, reduce backlogs, and prove early value to business partners.
2. Connect your core repositories
Integrate your sources of truth, including your document and contract management systems, collaboration tools, CRM, and shared drives. Glean keeps existing permissions intact, so information flows securely while maintaining governance across platforms.
3. Turn your playbook into a Glean Agent
Turn approved templates and guidance into reusable workflows. Glean Agents bring legal standards directly into everyday tools, helping legal teams and business partners work faster without sacrificing rigor or oversight.
4. Publish verified answers
Make it easy for employees to self-serve on recurring legal questions, like requesting support on NDAs and renewal terms, through permission-aware, policy-backed answers.
5. Measure and iterate
Measure adoption, deflection, and turnaround time, then use that data to refine prompts, expand use cases, and demonstrate ongoing value to leadership. Tracking the ‘before’ and ‘after’ data is key, along with regular measurement of ongoing SLAs and responsiveness.
What to measure from day one
These four pillars provide a simple framework for aligning progress with enterprise goals like deal velocity, compliance posture, and outside counsel spend.
Speed
Track end-to-end cycle time, and the number of turns by matter type. Faster reviews accelerate business decisions without increasing risk exposure.
Quality
Monitor deviation rates from playbooks and error rates in privacy or security questionnaires. Quality metrics ensure efficiency doesn’t come at the expense of diligence.
Protection
Evaluate audit readiness, policy adherence, and renewal management. This includes tracking key dates, sending reminders, and maintaining accurate status updates to avoid missed actions. Together, these practices support clean audits and reduce operational risk.
Savings
Quantify hours reclaimed, requests deflected, and reductions in outside counsel spend. Savings demonstrate how legal creates capacity, turning efficiency into strategic advantage.
Confidence through governance
The opportunity ahead isn’t to automate legal work, but to amplify it. With the right foundation, legal can move faster without losing rigor, scale expertise without scaling headcount, and focus its judgment where it matters most, all while automating the manual tasks.
That foundation starts with trust. When every answer is grounded in verified data, permissions are enforced by design, and results are measurable, AI is an enabler of change and a competitive advantage.
That's the real transformation: AI that strengthens legal's partnership with the business. Built on governance, connected through knowledge, and proven through impact.
