NetApp

NetApp's in-house legal team managed a contract portfolio exceeding 90,000 agreements — a volume that made manual review economically unsustainable. Lawyers spent thousands of hours locating specific provisions buried across supplier, customer, and partner contracts, creating chronic bottlenecks in deal velocity and risk oversight. The operational cost of this status quo became acute during the COVID-19 pandemic: supply chain disruptions required rapid identification of partial-shipment rights across hundreds of active contracts, a task that manual search could not execute at the speed the business required. Delayed answers put customer relationships at risk and exposed the company to avoidable revenue loss.

NetApp deployed Workday Contract Intelligence to ingest and analyze its entire contract portfolio using large language models and generative AI. The platform indexed all 90,000 contracts into a searchable repository, enabling clause-level querying across the full portfolio rather than document-by-document review. Legal operations teams could surface specific provisions — partial shipment rights, termination triggers, force majeure clauses — in minutes rather than days. The AI layer automated intake, extraction, and workflow routing, integrating into existing legal operations without requiring attorneys to abandon familiar processes. Rollout prioritized high-volume contract categories first, establishing confidence before expanding to the broader portfolio.

The deployment delivered $2.5 million in cost savings and recovered thousands of hours previously consumed by manual contract review. During COVID-19 supply chain disruptions, the system's ability to rapidly surface partial-shipment provisions across the active portfolio allowed NetApp to maintain customer commitments while managing inventory constraints — preserving relationships that manual review timelines would have jeopardized.

• $2.5M in documented cost savings
• 90,000 contracts analyzed and made queryable
• Thousands of attorney-hours redirected to higher-value work
• Critical clause retrieval reduced from days to minutes during supply chain crisis

The VP of Law, Technology, and Operations concluded: "You can't be a best-in-class legal department without introducing and becoming comfortable with AI technology."

• Contract portfolio scale is a forcing function: at 90,000+ agreements, AI-assisted review shifts from a productivity improvement to an operational necessity.
• Crisis resilience is an undervalued ROI driver — the ability to query clause-level provisions across a full portfolio within hours, not days, has direct revenue and relationship implications.
• Workday Contract Intelligence's integration into existing legal workflows reduced adoption friction; AI that fits current processes displaces reluctance faster than tools requiring behavioral overhaul.
• Executive sponsorship from legal leadership, not just IT, is the primary adoption accelerator in in-house legal deployments.