A legal ops manager at the Financial Times explains how in-house legal teams adopt AI without a law degree or a perfect plan.

In-house legal ops professionals need community built around productive disagreement, not echo chambers, to grow and stay sane.

You may have seen some commentary pop up LinkedIn over the past few months about legal engineering in legal tech startups. That they’re “Account reps with an impressive title.” “In many places, it’s just sales.” They “[sit]… drinking coffee with their

You ditched the CLM. Cue the "now what" panic: renewals still hit, contracts still need a home, the business still needs answers. Elly's take: a CLM is really just three jobs glued together, and each one is solvable with tools you already own.

Your business is sitting on hundreds of contracts — and all the value inside them is locked up. This walkthrough shows how Wordsmith fixes that with two features that work together. Repositories connect to where your documents already live (SharePoint, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence) — no migration, no implementation. Smart columns extract the data points you care about (counterparty, renewal date, liability cap, governing law) and keep them live as your files change. Set an alert on any column and Wordsmith emails you before a renewal or obligation comes due — so you're negotiating on the front foot, not scrambling inside the notice window. Reports give you the deep dive: a point-in-time analysis across your entire contract population, using preset columns, Yes/No fields, and tag columns for consistent, structured output in minutes instead of weeks. Using vendor contracts as the worked example, you'll see how the two fit together — the Repository as your always-current overview, the Report as your on-demand deep dive — replacing manual review, missed renewals, and expensive CLM tools.