Flex cuts contract risk review from a week to minutes with CLM and AI-powered tools

Flex's in-house legal team managed thousands of contracts globally each year using spreadsheets, PDFs, and an outdated, hard-to-navigate self-help webpage. This fragmented setup made contract data hard to access and processes hard to standardize, and answering basic risk questions (e.g., which contracts had force majeure notice provisions) required a week of work from multiple lawyers.

With backing from the GC and CEO, Flex centralized contract management under a unified platform: a digitized intake form linked to negotiation tools, playbooks, and storage, plus a contract scorecard dashboard making contracts searchable by clause and tied into financial systems. On the supplier side, Flex bought rather than built, licensing a secure large language model instance to answer contract risk questions and an AI-powered redlining tool, while building its customer-facing CLM in-house.

Risk questions that used to take a week of multiple lawyers' time can now be answered in minutes by running a report. The build-vs-buy approach also saved hundreds of thousands of dollars versus previously used outside tools, and centralized contract data enabled closer alignment between negotiated terms and actual account performance.

• Executive sponsorship (GC plus CEO and chief strategy officer) was the key enabler for funding and sustaining the transformation.
• Centralizing and structuring contract data turned week-long, multi-lawyer risk reviews into a minutes-long reporting task.
• A deliberate build-vs-buy split — building the customer-facing CLM in-house while buying AI redlining and LLM-based Q&A tools for supplier contracts — matched tools to actual needs rather than defaulting to one approach.