Jurist is like a junior associate that's always available. It can help with initial drafts, research, and analysis, allowing us to focus our time and outside counsel spend on more strategic matters. It's not just about saving time—it's about making our work product even better and more effective.
Contracting is how business gets done. A strong conviction in that belief is why we built Ironclad CLM, and it’s why we use it for our own contracting needs. As builders and users, teams across our organization have unique perspectives on making the most of the Ironclad platform. We want to share those perspectives with you in our new Ironclad Blueprints series.
In this fifth installment, we explore how our legal team leverages our legal AI assistant, Ironclad Jurist, to work faster and maintain high-quality legal work while managing growing demands.
The objective: Maximizing legal team efficiency and strategic value
As companies scale, legal teams face increasing demands across multiple areas—from contract negotiations to corporate governance, data privacy, employment, international expansion, and novel legal issues. Meeting these demands efficiently while maintaining quality requires innovative approaches to legal work. Our legal team was no exception, and earlier this year, between organizational changes, parental leaves, vacations, and a rapidly growing customer base, they were finding it a challenge to handle an expanding workload while maintaining their focus on strategic, high-value work.
Legal’s key priorities
In looking for ways to drive greater efficiency, the legal team identified several key goals:
Enhance strategic focus
The team needed to reduce time spent on routine tasks to focus more on complex, high-value work that required deep legal expertise.
Scale efficiently–while keeping the bar high
With requests coming in rapidly from every department, the team needed tools to help them maintain–and increase–the quality of their output and responsiveness without proportionally increasing headcount.
Streamline research and drafting
New legal territory often required extensive research and document creation, leading to delays and reliance on outside counsel.
The solution: Amplifying legal acumen with Ironclad Jurist
Recognizing these needs, the team turned to Jurist, Ironclad’s new AI legal assistant, designed to augment and improve all aspects of legal work, including researching, drafting, redlining, and brainstorming. They were hopeful that Jurist would allow them to tackle routine tasks while maintaining human judgment for strategic decisions. In reality, it provided quite a bit more.
Key features leveraged:
Drafting assistance: Beyond basic document creation, the team uses Jurist to draft detailed memos on specific legal questions and create executive summaries of complex legal resources. For example, when the team received extensive guidance from outside counsel on attorney-client privilege, Jurist helped distill it into clear, actionable internal language.
Document review: Jurist provides detailed analysis of legal documents, helping identify key issues and potential concerns. The team can even build playbooks of potential issues for different document types and have Jurist quickly and easily evaluate new documents against this custom issues list.
Legal research: Rather than search the web or send an email to outside counsel, the team can conduct comprehensive preliminary research on unfamiliar legal areas, complete with specific citations and relevant precedents, all within Jurist. This helps the team build baseline knowledge before engaging with outside counsel or other subject matter experts.
Iterative refinement: Being docx native, Jurist allows quick modifications directly in its online editor, so whether it’s adjusting document language, tone, structure, or something else, it can all be done in one place, meaning no context switching, or document downloading. With Jurist, the team can rapidly refine outputs until they match exact requirements.
How Ironclad’s legal team is using Jurist
1. Document creation and adaptation
When the legal team needed to update a US employment document for use in the UK, it faced a potentially time-consuming project. Instead of spending many hours on research and outside counsel consultation to become familiar with UK rules, they used Jurist to analyze the document and suggest specific modifications for UK compliance. “It produced a set of redline changes that we reviewed and determined were good enough for immediate use while we planned a deeper review,” Ironclad Senior Counsel Michael Ohta notes. “What could have taken weeks of back-and-forth was handled in minutes.”
2. Response drafting
The team uses Jurist to draft initial responses to complex legal situations. In one recent situation, a counterparty had a question about the validity of a signature on their contract. “I asked Jurist to draft an initial response addressing the legal aspects of signature authority,” Ohta said. “When the first draft was too formal, I asked it to make the tone friendlier while maintaining the legal points. The ability to quickly iterate on both content and tone helped us craft an effective response that addressed the counterparty’s concern.”
3. International compliance research
When exploring expansion into new markets, the team uses Jurist to research initial compliance requirements and employment regulations. For one such recent initiative, the team needed to understand a country’s local employment regulations and compliance requirements. “Before engaging with local counsel, we used Jurist to research their employment laws affecting US companies recruiting there,” says Ohta. “This gave us a framework for understanding key issues like mandatory benefits, working hours, and employment contracts. When we later spoke with local law firms, we could have much more informed and productive conversations.”
4. Conflict resolution guidance
During challenging contract negotiations, the team uses Jurist to explore potential compromise positions. “In one negotiation where we were stuck on specific terms, I asked Jurist to suggest different ways we could structure the compromise language,” Ohta shares. “It proposed a list of options, including several approaches I hadn’t considered, helping us find a creative solution that worked for both parties.”
The results: Enhanced efficiency and strategic focus
The implementation of Jurist has yielded benefits for both our legal team and their internal stakeholders:
More strategic use of resources
By handling manual or easily automated tasks, Jurist allows the legal team to both focus on strategic work and complex decision-making, plus use time with outside counsel more deliberately.
Improved scalability
The team can handle increased workload more efficiently, maintaining and even improving quality of legal output while managing growing requests because tasks that previously took weeks of back-and-forth communication can now be completed in hours or days.
Streamlined research
Conducting research and tackling novel legal scenarios no longer requires the team to spend hours digging through or creating mountains of documents in search of advice or precedent.
Bonus: Enhanced confidence
The ability to quickly get a second opinion or validation of outside counsel recommendations has improved the team’s confidence in decision-making.
Down the road
As the team continues to work with Jurist, they plan to expand its use across more workflows and processes. The focus remains on leveraging AI to enhance, rather than replace, legal expertise—ensuring that human judgment remains central while improving efficiency and scalability.
What's particularly valuable is how Jurist helps us learn and adapt quickly. Whether we're entering new markets or handling novel situations, it gives us a strong foundation to build from, making our entire legal operation more efficient and effective.
To start using Ironclad Jurist for yourself, schedule a 7-day free trial today.
