Legal teams have never used AI more. Matteo Pagani, CEO of Co-Flo, pointed to FTI research showing AI use in legal teams rose from 44% last year to 87% this year. Yet 77% of those teams say workload and complexity are rising, and only one in three expect headcount to grow in 2026 and 2027.
Matteo made that the starting point for a recent webinar aimed at legal, risk, compliance, procurement and IT leaders at African banks. His point is that AI speeds up individual tasks, but deciding which work matters most still falls to an already overloaded team.
Matteo splits the problem into three layers. Strategic risk is the danger that the business misses its annual targets, with knock-on effects for shareholder returns and bonuses. Operational risk is the exposure Legal cannot see: untracked work, regulatory and reputational exposure and obligations missed after signature. Individual risk is the human layer. When workload outruns capacity, anxiety builds, and that anxiety turns into underperformance.
He backs this up with figures. Only one in three senior executives rate their corporate services teams as high quality. Ineffective contract management leaks an average of 9.2% of revenue. Some 52% of in-house lawyers have seriously considered leaving because of stress or burnout, and 95% of them handle work while on leave.
The root cause is a mismatch between work and capacity, with no structure to decide what comes first. Teams in that position operate as a support function. Knowledge sits in individuals' heads, the loudest request wins and success gets measured in hours and matter counts rather than business impact. Risk only shows up once it has already landed.
A strategic function flips that around. Knowledge is shared across systems, work is ranked by business goals and risk surfaces before the impact arrives.
Getting there starts with the data legal already holds. Legal sits at the center of more information than most organizations realize. Internal legal entities carry cost, revenue and regulatory exposure. Suppliers, employees, regulators and customers attach to those entities. Contracts and matters connect it all, so legal already has the data needed to see how the business runs.
Once each contract and matter is linked to a legal entity, it can be tied to a business objective. High priority covers work that advances the strategic plan. Medium priority covers the day-to-day operational load. Low priority covers work with no clear objective, and it gets handled as capacity allows.
This changes the conversation with the business. When a general manager pushes a low-value request, legal can ask which strategic work should move aside to make room. Matteo described a GM who, faced with that request, tells the team to keep doing the strategic work, since that is what will count in year-end reporting. Others decide the team needs more resources. Either way, the discussion starts from data instead of volume.
Most legal teams organize work around documents. Folder structures in shared drives depend on whoever built them, so when that person leaves, the structure goes too. Email threads sit apart from the matters they concern, and stage and status are hard to track at the work or matter level.
A matter-centric model puts documents, emails, key dates and tasks in one workspace per matter or contract. Accountability can be kept up automatically, and the activity history doubles as an audit record. It also makes reporting easier, because you can see where a matter stands, what comes next and which deadline is close.
Contract Lifecycle Management is a natural place to start. Contracts carry the counterparties, dates and obligations that feed everything else. Obligations keep running long after signature, which is when most teams stop watching.
Automation only works on work that someone can see. Matteo showed agentic intake turning a single incoming email into a matter, with tasks and due dates attached, but that only happens once the matter, its entities and its dates sit in one workspace. Making the invisible visible comes first, and then AI can act on it. At Co-Flo, that Operational Intelligence layer is built on the iManage platform.
The three risks are not separate problems. Strategic exposure, operational blind spots and individual overload feed each other, so a team that can see its work and rank it against the business plan can address all three in the same process. The more useful question for legal leaders is whether the business can see what legal delivers, and whether legal can show what it will deliver and by when.
The full presentation, including the research and executive reporting approach, is available on demand.