The AI Revolution in Legal Operations: Daniela De La Vega Smith on Contract Lifecycle Management
AI has begun to earn its place, even if it is late in coming, in transforming the way legal and compliance teams work with unmatched efficiency and precision in an ever-accelerating sector of digitization. It is our pleasure to converse with Daniela De La Vega Smith, a renowned legal and compliance expert with over 18 years in oil and gas and a foremost voice in addressing AI and its potential influence on CLM.
Daniela’s extensive experience across high-stakes contract negotiations, tender design, and regulatory compliance in North and Latin America positions her uniquely to say how AI technologies are reshaping the contract management process.
In her exclusive interview, she delves deeply into how organizations are applying AI-powered CLM to optimize workflows and enhance interdisciplinary collaboration. Daniela further shares insights into the future of the AI innovations that will soon affect contract management, arguing that contract management has become an essential tool for the progressive firm sailing through the complexities of today’s legal landscape.
Artificial Intelligence Transforming Contract Lifecycle Management
Integrating AI with Life Cycle Systems (LCS) is fast turning into a necessity and useful for legal, procurement, and contracting departments. It acts as an effective solution in automating tedious processes that consume time and act as a drain on resources that could have been better applied in higher-value activities requiring skills, knowledge, and critical evaluation.
Various activities such as contract negotiations, answering questions posed on the scopes of agreements, comparing contracts, and checking compliance with both industry and internal standards are considered. Effective usage of AI tools can help analyze and process infinite amounts of data, allowing significant efficiency boosts especially for teams with limited resources. AI should primarily work toward saving costs and minimizing errors in any respectable legal or contract management team.
AI’s Contribution to Minimizing Error in Contract Management
Anything goes as far as human error and contract management are concerned excessive workloads, boring work, and little lapses of attention while reading some information. Mistakes in the course of the contract lifecycle can cost organizations a lot; in actual sense, most of these mistakes could easily be detected. With AI technology in the organization, it is capable of analyzing, summarizing, and comparing data within contracts based on the set policies, applicable laws, previous agreements, or any other parameter. Thus, AI can easily recognize deviations from the norm, either accidental or deliberate, that have crept into an agreement.
Question/Answer
Question: In which areas could Artificial Intelligence (AI) assist in compliance with contrived and ever-changing international regulations in contract management, predominantly for global corporations?
Answer: AI ensures that regulations are being monitored and businesses are informed about important changes and new requirements on a global basis with the help of pertinent regulatory databases. AI recommends changes to contract clauses based on local laws and shortens the review process by marking any incompatibilities with internal policies, regulations, and legal obligations. This revolutionizes the complex compliance controls with which companies have to grapple, allowing them to stay the course as evolving regulations arise.
Question: How has AI in contract management been leveraged by organizations for optimizing workflows and interdepartmental collaboration?
Answer: In automating mundane tasks such as contract evaluations, summaries, data analysis, and risk assessments, organizations have significantly enhanced levels of teamwork and interdepartmental efficiency. Such automation simplifies the process, thereby enhancing turnaround time and fruitful collaboration.
A centralized database keeps all teams posted through alerts and notifications to key stages in the contract lifecycle ensuring every stakeholder is kept in the loop. The contract database encourages interaction since support requests and inquiries are anchored in the real-time data to which all members of the team have access.
Apart from speeding up innovation, scaling businesses to harness the potential of AI/ML technologies at an exceptionally large scale and efficiency.
Additionally, the capacity to analyze and predict risks is further enhanced by interlinking other departments such as supply chain, legal, and sales. Therefore, all contracts would be evaluated in light of their performance in the context of any external effect.