Cargill

Cargill's in-house legal team faced a problem endemic to large enterprise legal departments: decades of institutional knowledge trapped in disconnected repositories, SharePoint folders, and the heads of individual attorneys. Prior modernization attempts compounded the dysfunction — CLM implementations that lawyers refused to adopt, point solutions that couldn't communicate with each other, and automation layered over broken processes. The result was a legal function that still operated reactively: every contract question required manual folder-digging, re-researching positions already taken, or escalating to outside counsel. Institutional knowledge didn't compound. The business paid for the same judgment twice.

Cargill deployed Eudia's Contract Insights platform to build what the team called a 'company brain' — a semantic search and retrieval layer built specifically on Cargill's own contract history. Rather than another system-of-record CLM, Eudia ingested and normalized historical contracts across repositories, benchmarked clause language, captured negotiation playbooks, and tagged issues so attorneys could query the full portfolio in natural language. The system surfaces clause history, prior risk positions, and jurisdiction-level results in seconds. Critically, the deployment was funded from existing outside counsel spend rather than a separate software budget, bypassing the typical pilot-rebuild-reintegrate cycle and accelerating time-to-value.

Legal research time dropped by approximately 50%, with attorneys reusing captured positions and clause context instead of re-researching each matter from scratch. The impact became concrete during an urgent ESG request — identifying all deforestation clauses across the entire contract portfolio — which was resolved in under 10 minutes with jurisdiction-level results, a task that previously required a firm handoff or a days-long internal scramble. The team now delivers 10+ topic-driven insights per week on topics such as tariffs and price escalation, shifting Legal from a reactive service function to a proactive signal generator for Finance, Operations, and Risk leadership.

• Reframe the goal from 'contract management' to 'institutional intelligence ownership' — the compounding value comes from retrieval, not storage.
• Fund AI tooling from existing outside counsel spend to avoid budget battles and produce faster, demonstrable ROI.
• Semantic search across a historical contract corpus requires upfront normalization work; the quality of ingestion directly determines the quality of retrieval.
• Keep humans in the judgment layer and automate the retrieval and comparison work — adoption follows when attorneys see the system amplifying their expertise, not replacing it.
• Capturing matter intelligence once and making it reusable enterprise-wide is what converts Legal from a cost center into a strategic asset.