Your company should have zero in-house lawyers by 2030 — here’s the roadmap

Last week, I visited a customer at a 300-person construction company. They’ve been around for 70+ years, and have offices in 12 cities.

Know what they don’t have anymore? An in-house legal team.

They’ve outsourced all their legal work to outside counsel.

This isn’t even unusual anymore. A full 70 percent of Concord’s customers don’t have legal teams in-house anymore. And AI is accelerating this.

Here’s why it’s happening:

Legal teams don’t get involved with 90 percent of contracts. Templatized agreements sail through to signature without any redlining or negotiation.

Plus, 90 percent of contracts never get taken to court. Which makes sense! Are you seriously going to sue a customer over a late $1,000 payment? Is Salesforce or Apple going to take you to court over that amount of money?

Of course not! So why do companies need full-time in-house legal teams?

And now, AI gives everyone legal knowledge they didn’t have before. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini… they can all tell you when clauses are poorly worded, or contract language is exposing you to risks. Soon, all contract software – including Concord – will do this automatically.

Lawyers don’t need to worry about their jobs, though. We still need them for complex negotiations. It’s just that their time is better spent where their expertise matters – not babysitting version 17 of an end user agreement.

Here’s how to get to zero in-house lawyers by 2030:

1. List out which agreements you actually negotiate.
   You’ll be surprised to find how few deals end up on the list.
   
2. Let your CFO manage your contracts.
   Contracts are about money that flows in and out of cour company. Your CFO’s team (a.k.a. Finance, Procurement, and Ops) should manage them.
   
3. Use AI for first-pass review.
   Have it scan every contract and flag anything out of the ordinary. Suddenly, Legal doesn’t have to read 90 percent of your docs. Boom.
   
4. Templatize every contract.
   Build standard templates for those 90 percent of standardized scenarios. Contract automation software can generate these for you in seconds.
   
5. Call in outside counsel when you need them.
   For those 10 percent of truly nuanced negotiations, bring in outside counsel and let them do what they do best.

Your competitors are already doing most of this. How do I know? Because they’re my customers, and I talk to them every quarter.

Do you think I’m being radical here, or just realistic?

If you’re a lawyer… what’s your perspective? I genuinely want to know.

---

Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.