Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Cuts Contract Delivery Time From 28 Days to 6 With AI

Contract drafting, review, and negotiation at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer traditionally consumed weeks of associate time. Clause comparison, due diligence, document summarisation, and risk flagging were labor-intensive tasks that bottlenecked deal teams and were historically used to train junior associates.

The firm deployed AI and machine learning systems trained on its own precedent libraries to automate large portions of the contract drafting, review, and negotiation workflow, handling clause comparison, due diligence, document summarisation, and risk flagging that previously required extensive associate time.

Contract delivery time fell from 28 days to six days, a roughly 79% reduction, freeing lawyers to focus on negotiation strategy, complex structuring, and client advisory work instead of routine document tasks.

• Elite law firms are beginning to tie AI adoption to measurable, client-facing deliverables (like turnaround time) rather than only internal efficiency metrics.
• Automating document-intensive work threatens the traditional training pipeline where junior associates historically cut their teeth on exactly this kind of work.