The right tools help legal teams work faster, collaborate better, and reduce risk — without changing how they work.

In contract law, the work product is generally the document. But that doesn’t mean document production is all lawyers should think about.

Much of the friction in legal deal work happens before a contract is ready for signature: in the countless redlines, reviews, and back-and-forths that eat up hours and open the door for risk. Whether you're in-house or at a firm, contract review is often where productivity bottlenecks start.

Legal tech can help. But only if it supports the way lawyers actually work.

Here’s how the right solution can make contract drafting and review smoother, faster, and more consistent — without forcing you to leave Word or learn a complicated tool.

1. Reduce Time Spent on Manual Edits and Error-Checking

Legal documents are complex. And while many edits require sound professional judgment, others are pure grunt work: renumbering sections, finding defined terms, fixing formatting, checking cross-references. These small tasks add up, and they pull focus away from what matters.

Modern legal tools can automate:

• Definition checks (and identifying undefined terms)
• Clause comparisons and reuse
• Numbering and formatting consistency
• Citations and cross-references
  
  These aren’t just “nice to have” features; they save real hours and help reduce risk in every transaction.
  
  

2. Streamline Collaboration Across Teams

In a high-stakes contract, lawyers generally work with clients, opposing counsel, and internal stakeholders. Multiple versions fly back and forth. Comments multiply. Intent gets lost.

Legal tech that integrates natively with Word — and supports simultaneous edits and comment tracking — lets you:

• Collaborate without version chaos
• Maintain a clean audit trail of changes
• Respond to comments faster, with fewer misunderstandings
  
  

The result? Fewer bottlenecks, fewer missed issues, and a smoother path to signature.

3. Make Templates and Precedent Easier to Reuse

Most firms and legal teams have a goldmine of knowledge in their prior work. But reusing it is often harder than it should be. Precedents live in inboxes. Templates go out of date. Lawyers rebuild from scratch.

Smart drafting tools can:

• Surface relevant past clauses in context
• Make approved templates searchable and up-to-date
• Highlight changes from prior versions
  

This ensures more consistency across matters (and gives junior lawyers a real head start).

4. Lower the Risk of Hidden Errors and Omissions

Small mistakes can have big consequences. An undefined term. A missed cross-reference. A clause that contradicts another a few pages later.

Legal tech can catch these issues early — before they make it into a final draft or get missed in a last-minute review. And good tech does so without getting in the lawyer’s way.

5. Preserve the Lawyer’s Workflow

Most legal tech fails not because it’s inherently bad, but because it asks too much. Lawyers don’t want to change how they work, especially under time pressure.

That’s why the most effective tools work with your process, not against it. They:

• Integrate with Microsoft Word (not replace it)
• Require little to no training
• Feel like an assistant, not a new system

The result is real adoption — and real impact.

Want to Design a Better Workflow for Your Team?

We’ve put together a free guide to help law firms and in-house legal teams streamline their contract drafting and review processes.

It covers:

• Practical ways to reduce friction in legal work
• Criteria for evaluating legal tech tools
• Templates for more efficient workflows
  
  

👉Download the guide here: Designing Efficient Legal Workflows

And if you’re ready to see how modern drafting tech works in practice, get a demo to see what you can do with BoostDraft.