Interest in automating tasks in company legal teams is intensifying as they try to help the rest of the business to operate faster — from drafting contracts to handling a cyber attack — or to use artificial intelligence. And, as always, legal departments remain under pressure from the rest of the business to cut their own costs.

In the final piece in the 2025 FT Accelerating Business series, on how tech helps legal teams to keep pace with business needs, we meet four individuals who have overhauled tech and processes to solve some of the most common challenges. These include coping with crises, cutting law firm spending, and improving communication and collaboration with other departments.

The four were picked by RSGI, the FT’s research partner, based on research for the FT’sInnovative Lawyers* series.*

Farrah Pepper

chief legal innovation counsel and chief global discovery counsel — Marsh McLennan

Farrah Pepper: AI is just another a tool that will sometimes add value

When Farrah Pepper needs to explain what her job entails, she may start with a pun that she “makes things click” — Clic being an acronym of her role as chief legal innovation counsel.

In that role she leads a team of five, set up in 2019 to develop technology to assist a global legal and compliance department of about 650 people at the world’s largest insurance broker.

The team includes former technologists who work with the IT department to build tech that helps the legal team complete tasks more easily and quickly.

She has become “adept at bridging the world between law and tech,” she says. Her team’s efforts include helping the company save at least $9mn last year by managing its own legal data.

Previously, Marsh McLennan paid specialist outsourcing providers to store, process and review the information. Now it keeps more of its legal data in-house. In some situations, legal data can be retrieved twice as fast as before, Pepper estimates. And she expects “substantial” savings on handling data to continue, although the amount will fluctuate according to the volume of legal data handled within the company.

Sometimes the question a team needs to answer is “a yes or a no question”, she says: “They don’t need every piece of data.” The query might be as simple as “Does this one contract exist? Did this one person do a particular action?” Finding such information quickly and easily helps lawyers finish a legal task sooner, she adds.

As for the latest developments in AI, Pepper describes her approach as “measured but proactive”. It focuses on uses of AI with immediate and tangible outcomes, including document review and analysis, multilingual translation and extracting key clauses and evidence.

AI is just another a tool that will sometimes add value, she adds.

Andreas Vosskamp

head of group corporate legal and legal operations — Adecco

Andreas Vosskamp: Adecco’s in-house legal tech includes initiatives to track workloads and litigation risk

Switzerland-based global recruitment company Adecco has restructured its legal operations in a push to improve efficiency. That has meant creating a single in-house legal operation in each country subsidiary. Previously, different legal teams in each country worked “in silos” according to which Adecco business units they supported, says Andreas Vosskamp, head of group corporate legal and global legal operations.

The overhaul of Adecco’s legal operations — part of a wider team of around 370 legal, compliance, insurance and intellectual property employees across 45 countries − relies on automating legal tasks and cutting administrative work.

In several projects, under Vosskamp’s leadership, Adecco has built its own legal technology.

For example, an in-house tool has been helping legal staff for the past 18 months or so to track important litigation cases worldwide that involve Adecco. The software automatically compiles quarterly reports on litigation risks for each country, based on data from thousands of documents. Previously that process involved email and spreadsheets, with staff “aggregating” and “cleaning” the data, says Vosskamp, who joined Adecco in 2023.

The benefits include more efficient reporting, better communication within the company and fewer errors.

Moreover, to help manage its overall workload, the legal team has built triage-style software to help lawyers assess and prioritise requests for legal support. Progress of a request for legal help is clearer to the rest of the business.

The tool highlights when missing information is holding up a task, as well as which lawyers are working on it. The cost of building the tool was relatively modest because Adecco used existing IT, Vosskamp says. “[Requests] go into a tracker and then are . . . allocated to the different lawyers and reviewers,” he says. Again, dashboards reveal the state and pace of progress.

He estimates that the tool has boosted the US commercial legal team’s efficiency by 40 per cent, by cutting time spent on administration and improving response times. Initially used in the UK and US, it is being rolled out to Adecco legal teams in other countries, he adds.

While Adecco also uses AI software from legal start-up Harvey for document drafting and legal research, Vosskamp has focused on efforts to use it to automate tasks in-house.

Maria Pedrosa Martínez

head of new law and digital — Repsol

Maria Pedrosa Martínez: ‘If we had a cyber attack, I’m the focal point in the legal affairs division to . . . deal with it’

Maria Pedrosa Martínez set up a small but ambitious “new law and digital” legal team at Spanish energy group Repsol this year.

With the new six-strong team, Pedrosa, previously head of legal tech and knowledge management, is progressing a project set up by general counsel Pablo Blanco Pérez to improve the legal department’s general efficiency, training and use of technology.

Now, Pedrosa has prioritised seven goals, including AI, training and new ways of working. The new team is supported by around 65 other Repsol in-house legal staff.

In addition to heading the new legal tech team, her remit includes leading legal operations and encouraging innovation across the in-house team. Her focus on tech and innovation will continue in the new year, when the current legal modernisation phase ends.

Pedrosa says the new team is purposely “like a hybrid” of legal operations and legal tech. It also advises Repsol on digital law — how to comply with AI and data privacy regulations, for example, or helping to deal with the legal implications of a successful cyber attack, including compliance with any cyber-related legal regulations or law. “If we had a cyber attack, I’m the focal point in the legal affairs division to . . . deal with it,” she says, as part of a multidisciplinary cyber security team advising Repsol’s chief information security officer.

On training, Repsol has partnered with IE law school in Spain and Harvard Law School to train legal staff worldwide in a standardised “common way of working” and methodology, she says. Course modules include AI ethics, law and technology, and case law.

Under her leadership, the new team uses AI software from legal start-up Harvey for tasks such as drafting contracts or litigation, including suggestions for how to respond to a lawsuit and the likelihood of that approach being successful. The software, which Repsol began to use last year, has saved its lawyers up to six hours a week by automating legal tasks, says Pedrosa.

Ron Wills

vice-president of legal — CrowdStrike

Ron Wills: ‘We can use AI to reduce the amount of “hay[stack]” we’re searching’

If you have around 25 years of experience in senior legal roles at a law firm and some leading tech companies, unintended consequences and the occasional corporate crisis go with the job.

Ron Wills needed all his experience on July 19, 2024 when a botched software upgrade at US cyber security company CrowdStrike caused one of the world’s biggest ever IT outages. “It was an all-hands-on deck moment,” says Wills, who joined the company in 2020. “People [the legal team] included, were working around the clock.”

Then and during the aftermath, in-house legal staff helped to liaise with customers and check that CrowdStrike honoured its contractual obligations. “I personally talked to many, many customers,” says Wills.

The company’s shares plunged by more than a third, but CrowdStrike eventually more than recovered its market value. And within the company, the legal department’s use of AI has accelerated, he adds.

CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz has identified AI as a priority and asked the legal department to be an “internal champion” for the technology, says Wills. “Our chief legal officer [Cathleen Anderson] really embraced that, and she stood kind of shoulder to shoulder with us.” She backed mandatory training for legal staff to improve AI literacy and competence, at speed.

Wills, the legal team and other colleagues use AI for tasks such as researching patent applications and litigation cases, reviewing contracts and summarising information. They have begun to experiment with AI agents — a subset of AI that aims to perform tasks on its own − to automate parts of litigation that might otherwise require lawyers to sift millions of pages of documents.

“We’re finding that we can use AI to reduce the amount of ‘hay[stack]’ we’re searching and find a lot more ‘needles’ faster,” says Wills. Benefits include CrowdStrike lawyers getting a quicker view of the merits of a litigation case or the legal challenges involved.

CrowdStrike’s use of AI has helped the legal department to halve spending on intellectual property advice from external legal firms. Wills adds that it has also reduced by 90 per cent its “prior art” costs, when lawyers determine that an invention idea is entitled to patent protection by checking it is novel and not already publicly known. “That’s a big win.”