There’s a seemingly infinite number of ways to apply AI to contract workflows, but some are far more impactful than others.
Phrased another way: just because you can apply AI to a contract or other type of workflow, doesn’t mean you should. For example, earlier this year, Amazon reportedly incurred a cost overage of 1.8 million dollars related to a menial coding task using Anthropic’s models.
I previously wrote about AI’s evolving role in decoupling judgment from execution in the enterprise contracts space, including historical context, and introduced the value of breaking down a contract or other legal workflow end to end.
In this article I’ll share a practical framework for mapping out workflows and identifying the high-impact opportunities to apply AI.
Terminology
Here’s how I define a few key terms for purposes of this article:
Judgment refers to domain expertise, tacit knowledge or experience in dealing with specific types of problems.
Execution refers to completing work, guided by judgment. Another way of thinking about it: judgment is knowing what work is important to do (and when and how to do it), while execution is actually doing it.
A task refers to a unit of work that needs to be completed. For example, finding a contract or researching a legal issue.
A workflow refers to completing a series of related tasks connected together to achieve some broader goal.
Couple call-outs:
These terms can blend a little bit. For example, contract drafting can be a described as an overall workflow (if planning, research, analysis is included in that scope), but drafting a contract can also refer to a single task if referring to the specific step of writing or updating the contract document after completing any other necessary parts of the process.
I’ve noticed that as of late, the market sometimes refers to a workflow as using agents or other AI capabilities to complete one or more tasks. For purposes of this article, a workflow may or may not involve AI.
Breaking Down a Contract Workflow
Breaking down a workflow involves mapping out the entire process from beginning to end: the key stages, inputs and outputs, decision points, and other necessary steps to successfully move from one stage to the end.
In a workflow such as drafting a contract, this may look like: receive trigger or notification, perform intake / scope out problem, create plan, define criteria, perform research, summarize research, perform analysis of research, draft contract, share contract draft, etc.
Framework / Questionnaire
We can use a more general framework to break down similar types of workflows and identify the higher impact opportunities to apply AI. For those that want to do so, here’s a starter set of questions that I’ve found helpful:
Subscribe to get the full framework (it’s free).
Hope this was helpful – if you have any feedback or requests for other walkthroughs, send me a note.
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