Cached at:
10/28/26, 02:05 PM
**TL;DR:** Legora General Counsel Emma Kadri Bergström shares how AI has transformed legal teams from a **business bottleneck** into **strategic partners** — in the case of NDA review alone, workload dropped from 20% to less than 1%.
# From Legal Bottleneck to Business Partner: Legora's General Counsel Emma Kadri Bergström on How AI Is Reshaping Legal Work
## A Late-Night Assignment From a Decade Ago
Emma Kadri Bergström recalls a scene from ten years ago: late at night, she was tasked with summarizing license terms across a stack of vendor contracts by the next morning. She quickly realized this was an almost impossible task.
"And today, with the tools we have, it's become entirely possible," she says.
This experience is the starting point of her understanding of AI's value — not an abstract technology narrative, but a real work scenario: tight deadlines, massive volumes of material, and manual effort that simply can't keep up.
## The Most Visible Impact of AI: Faster, More Parallel, Without Sacrificing Quality
As General Counsel of Legora, Emma points to the most obvious examples of how AI has changed both the practice of law and her personal workflow:
- **Moving work forward faster**
- **Handling more matters in parallel**
- **Maintaining high-quality standards**
This means she can initiate different types of tasks within Legora and collaborate with colleagues, opposing counsel, and other third parties — all leveraging AI to complete the work together.
## Starting With NDAs: Automating the Most Tedious Part
Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are the quintessential example Emma cites. "NDAs are boring documents. You have to have them, but no one really wants to spend time negotiating them," she says. It was also one of the first areas they automated.
The automation path wasn't complex:
1. Start by getting standard, high-volume documents like NDAs working end to end;
2. From there, building a **playbook** becomes relatively straightforward;
3. AI reviews the contract first, **flagging clauses that fall outside the acceptable range**;
4. Humans focus only on the flagged exceptions.
The results are measurable: before building these playbooks and automation workflows, the team spent approximately **20% of full-time work hours** reviewing NDAs; now that figure has **dropped to less than 1%**.
Even more important is the reallocation of value — reducing time spent on NDAs allows the team to focus energy on more strategic work, such as **higher-value contracts** or **strategically significant transactions**. "And that's where we create the most value."
## Supporting Rapid Growth: From 3 Offices to 18, 3 Funding Rounds, 5 Acquisitions
The tools deliver not just efficiency, but the ability for a small team to support rapid business growth. Emma reveals that in just the past 12 months, Legora has:
- Expanded from **3 offices to 18**
- Completed **three funding rounds**
- Made **five acquisitions**
"Without the tools you need, doing all of that with a very small team would be extremely difficult," she says. Using Legora enables the legal team to keep pace with the business's rapid development. She describes it as their team's "secret weapon" — helping them stay aligned with the company's growth and push forward the projects that need to move.
## The Parts That Remain Human: Accountability and Working With People
Emma emphasizes that AI has not replaced the human aspects of the legal role. She identifies these as:
- **Accountability for the advice given**
- **The people-facing side of the work**
With less time spent reviewing documents one by one, more time can be devoted to **strategic planning**, **meeting with people**, and **reaching alignment on what actually needs to be done**.
"The accountability piece doesn't change. No matter through what channel or tool advice is delivered, there's always a real person accountable for that advice."
## Not Becoming a Bottleneck Means Not Getting Bypassed
Emma points out that every legal department worries about becoming a bottleneck for the business: "If you do become a bottleneck, the business will stop coming to you, which increases risk and makes the lawyer's job even harder."
Not being a bottleneck is therefore a critical driver for legal teams of all kinds. One of the things she is most proud of in the Legora legal team is that they have successfully **maintained their role as strategic business partners** — a legal team that can **engage early in projects**, respond fast enough, and deliver value, and all of that **wouldn't be possible without AI**.
## Looking Ahead: Embrace New Technologies and Enjoy the Journey
Emma believes that with so many great technologies emerging today, the legal industry has become much more interesting. "So the future is bright. Just embrace these new technologies and new ways of working. Yes, have fun with it."
Source: From legal bottleneck to business partner | Legora's Emma Kadri Bergström (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2Oa42hF67E) — OpenAI