How Docusign Takes Legal Teams From Bottleneck to Business Backbone

As a corporate legal professional, you stand at a critical intersection: safeguarding the business while enabling its growth. The demands on your team are higher than ever, with constant regulatory shifts, the integration of AI and other emerging technologies, tariff changes, and relentless pressure to manage mounting volumes of agreements, inquiries, and risk management responsibilities without proportional resources. Relying on manual processes, email, and static spreadsheets makes it incredibly challenging to move quickly, maintain complete oversight, and provide the strategic counsel your business demands. Outdated technology and fragmented tools are actively preventing your team from operating at its full strategic capacity. 

Your expertise is vital, but operational inefficiencies can often stand in the way of maximizing your impact and clearly articulating the significant value you deliver across the organization.

As America’s most trusted company to manage critical agreements, we believe the key to overcoming these challenges lies in transforming how you manage your agreements. In fact, 77% of organizations that outperform their financial goals credit advanced agreement management for their success. Taking charge of your agreement process empowers you to reinforce your team’s foundational strengths, better navigate changes, and make your role both easier and significantly more effective across the enterprise. Here’s how.

The strategic imperative: keeping pace with legal technology

Keeping pace with legal technology is critical for efficiency, maintaining effectiveness, mitigating risks, and ensuring that your team is a strategic enabler rather than an operational bottleneck. Failing to adopt and leverage the latest advancements means facing increasing inefficiencies and a widening gap in the ability to provide timely, insightful counsel.

The legal operations community, as evidenced at this year’s CLOC Global Institute (CGI), is tired of AI hype that promises big things and delivers next to nothing. Legal teams are seeking practical, demonstrable solutions with proven metrics so they can demonstrate value and ROI for every technological investment. This requires thorough vetting and scrutiny to find tools that deliver measurable success.

Teams using advanced agreement solutions—particularly those leveraging AI, machine learning, and data analytics—have seen direct, tangible improvements. According to a recent report by Deloitte and Docusign, over 70% of legal teams that used advanced agreement management technology reported positive impacts on their caseloads, better legal outcomes in disputes, and increased sales team satisfaction scores.

As technology continues its rapid progression, the benefits for legal teams that keep pace will only grow. This is emphasized in the 2024 State of the Corporate Law Department report, with 76% of respondents believing in AI’s potential to boost efficiency and 44% seeing AI aiding in risk management.  

Docusign: A core solution for legal

As organizations increasingly seek technology that delivers measurable impact, the focus has shifted from standalone point solutions to integrated systems that drive efficiency, intelligence, and scale across the business. Building on this shift, Docusign Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is now a foundational part of a broader platform of agreement solutions: the Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform.

For corporate legal teams at every stage, the integrated approach of the Docusign IAM platform is essential—not only for managing risk and ensuring compliance, but also for elevating legal teams to be true business enablers. With access to a wide range of capabilities and integrations in one place, legal can more effectively support departments like sales, procurement, and HR by streamlining workflows, accelerating deal velocity, and providing greater visibility and control across the entire agreement lifecycle. 

Here’s how Docusign empowers your team and helps you demonstrate value:

• Meeting businesses where they work: One of the most significant advantages is the ability to integrate seamlessly into the systems your business partners already use. Whether it’s enabling sales teams to manage contracts within Salesforce or allowing procurement to handle vendor agreements within SAP Ariba or Coupa—driven by legal’s approved processes—Docusign reduces friction and supports compliance obligations without forcing other departments to use unfamiliar tools.

• Adaptable to your structure: We recognize that corporate legal teams are organized in various ways. Docusign is flexible enough to adapt to different structures, providing centralized control and consistency where needed while supporting the unique requirements of specific divisions or functions. This adaptability is crucial for maintaining control and driving efficiency across your entire contract portfolio.

• Enhanced visibility and control: Gain a single source of truth for all contracts. Quickly find what you need, track changes, monitor obligations, and proactively manage risk with robust reporting and dashboards. This provides the data you need to measure and report on key legal and operational metrics.

• Streamlined processes: Agreement Desk uses AI and automation to accelerate the entire agreement lifecycle, from initial request to final signature. It offers a central hub for internal teams to request, track, review, and manage agreements. With complete visibility across stakeholders, Agreement Desk helps teams assign and route work efficiently and makes it easy for legal, sales, and procurement to collaborate in real time.

• AI-Powered intelligence: Docusign offers comprehensive, customizable AI insights through Docusign Iris, our AI engine specifically for agreements. Built on specialized agreement data and expertise, Iris brings intelligent automation and insights to legal teams and stakeholders. Docusign does the work of vetting and incorporating fit-for-purpose innovation that drives meaningful, measurable impact, helping you solve key legal operational challenges and move business forward faster.

From cost center to strategic growth driver

Ultimately, the impact of a powerful agreement management platform like Docusign IAM extends beyond operational efficiency to redefining legal’s potential within the enterprise. Docusign empowers your legal team to move beyond being perceived merely as a cost center to becoming a critical growth driver and a leader in digital transformation for the organization. Recently released AI-driven capabilities like AI-Assisted Review are helping legal teams review complex sales contracts with greater ease and efficiency so they can move business forward faster.

By harnessing the power of data-driven insights and streamlining legal processes for enhanced speed and efficiency, your legal team can more directly contribute to the company’s bottom line. This newfound ability to demonstrate tangible value elevates the department’s standing, positioning it as a strategic partner in achieving key business objectives.

Additionally, the legal team’s unique position can help drive enterprise-wide success in adopting and implementing innovative agreement management technology that scales as agreement needs grow. This not only enhances the company’s overall agility and competitiveness but also solidifies the legal team’s reputation as a forward-thinking and indispensable asset.

Partnering for impact: Docusign for legal

Choosing the right agreement management solution is a strategic decision. It’s about finding a partner who understands the complexities of legal work and provides a platform that enhances your capabilities. This allows you to navigate the challenges of today’s business environment with confidence, control, and strategic impact.

Explore how Docusign can help your legal team.