Ringier

Ringier's legal department, covering roughly 130 subsidiaries across print, digital media, ticketing, entertainment and online marketplaces, faced a growing workload reviewing over 100 data processing agreements (DPAs) per year. Stricter GDPR case law and the need to retrofit new EU standard contractual clauses into existing DPAs added further pressure, while the legal team's limited headcount made manual review of every contract increasingly unsustainable.

Laurence Hulliger, Head of Legal Commercial, IP & Technology, adopted Legartis's AI-powered contract review tool exclusively for DPA review, since these contracts follow a repetitive, standardized structure well suited to automation. Legartis's Word add-in flags missing or incomplete clauses against a shared contract playbook, which also supplies standard clause wording directly within the document under review.

Legartis automatically covers about 75% of the clauses found in Ringier's DPAs, with the remaining 25% (Ringier-specific formulations, EU/US terminology differences, and linked external documents) still checked manually. Review time for a simple DPA dropped from about 45 minutes to roughly 15-20 minutes, and the tool's playbook now lets less experienced team members review DPAs with greater confidence.

• Highly standardized, repetitive contract types like DPAs are strong early candidates for AI-assisted review, even with a small legal team.
• AI coverage has real limits — company-specific clause wording, cross-jurisdiction terminology (EU vs. US), and links to external documents still require manual checking.
• A shared contract playbook doubles as a knowledge management tool, letting less experienced staff review contracts previously requiring more expertise.