In a recent conversation with Lexology, nadim Baklouti (CEO at DiliTrust) and Rupali Patel Shah (Head of Legal Solutions and Alliances at DiliTrust) dissected the legal department’s systemic challenges in recent years. Legal tech overpromised and did not deliver.
After years of investment in “digital transformation,” DiliTrust teams have noticed most legal departments say the same thing first: “We are overloaded.”
The tools developed to help addressed symptoms and solved for point-problems, but left the underlying structural problems untouched.
For two decades, legal tech promised to fix this. From CLM platforms to AI-powered reviews and automations. Yet most in-house teams are still drowning, and many cannot name the AI tools their organization has actually deployed.
When the speakers asked legal leaders how many AI tools they were using, the most common answer was “honestly, I’m not sure.” But rest assured, that uncertainty is not a leadership failure. It is the symptom of something deeper: three interconnected crises silently holding legal departments back.
These crises arise silently not because they’re invisible, but because they never appear where leadership looks. The issues do not show up as budget line items and get misattributed to headcount constraints or “underutilized tools.” In short, the problems are written off as the unavoidable cost of legal work. As a result, they are not addressed, quarter after quarter, while the department continues to operate in a state of controlled dysfunction.
The overload crisis when doing more with less
This is not new, but legal teams are expected to do more with less, and the workload piles up. The issue goes beyond using a tool or not, but a lot of problems stem from being asked to do more with less.
Patel Shah recounts how she managed 600 contracts per year entirely by herself, without a CLM or AI-powered tools. One day she went on medical leave, and that is when leadership realized that institutional knowledge, negotiation strategies, risk appetite, and exceptions—all lived in her head.
Ultimately, overload burns out individuals and keeps legal departments tactical rather than strategic. Without the right systems in place, individual lawyers become single points of failure.
The overload problem doesn’t just drown the individual contributor. It really stymies an organization. It keeps you very tactical. And at best it’s risk mitigation – not risk prevention.
The overload problem does not just drown the individual contributor. It can paralyze an organization. It keeps the legal team’s work very tactical rather than strategical. And at best it’s risk mitigation – not risk prevention.
Organizations cannot win with such a mindset; there is little opportunity to build systems that outlast individual contributors, which results in reactive work settings, not proactive ones where the true value of legal work resides.
The data governance crisis, or rather ungoverned data crisis
Baklouti opened up this section with a simple question that most legal departments fail to answer precisely: “How many contracts do you manage?”
Without the right systems in place such as CLM tools, contracts are signed, filed away in SharePoint or buried somewhere. That somewhere is usually email threads or shared workspaces. Your contracts in this case hold a lot of value, but if no one knows where they are and what they say, it is hard to use them properly. As Baklouti puts it:
The commercial terms matter—that’s how you make your money, that’s how you spend your money, and it’s how you can lose money. And you can have the best contract, but if six months from now, you have a new CFO or the person in charge is gone and no one remembers what was in those contracts.
In addition to team members leaving, Patel Shah and Baklouti note that nowadays stability is rare, and any geopolitical or regulatory shift can make or break your legal strategy. Without clean and structured data governance, every new contract, entity update, or board document lost or forgotten represents financial exposure and missed opportunities. Buried data is the enemy, and legal plays a role in handling the problem.
The fragmentation crisis and disconnected tools
Fragmented solutions are a pain point for legal departments, especially as they grow or change. Many teams rely on distinct tools that rarly bring the function together. Unlike finance with ERPs, or Marketing and Sales with CRMs, legal often operates as a collection of individual contributors. This means everyone works their own way, with their own tools and processes.
In practice one person uses Notion, another relies on Excel, someone else has a niche contract tracker. Then when tools are finally adopted at department level, they are deployed in silos. A CLM for contracts, a separate entity management system, disconnected matter tracking.
Individual tools may improve personal efficiency, but they don’t create enterprise efficiency. Without a shared process or unified data layer, the department never functions as a cohesive unit. Patel Shah explained:
We (in previous company) were a department, but we really were just a group of individual contributors working in their own way, using their own processes.
The result is predictable: instead of tools making the team more efficient, the lack of cohesion and strategy spreads the problem further. When emergencies or sudden shifts happen, there is no single system to lean on and every contributor comes with their story, data, and insights.
The common thread
The three crises share a common trait: they are systemic. When a problem is systemic, it must be solved with long-term vision and fixes, not point solutions.
The reality is that:
Technology has a role to play, including AI. But without the right foundation governed data, connected systems and clear processes – AI simply accelerates disfunction that already exists. So the real question becomes: Do we as a department have the right system in place to make the tech work?
In the next installment of this series, we will introduce the governance blueprint that addresses all three crises by focusing on people, processes, and only then the tools. We will explore why the order matters if you want to avoid chaos—and how it affects even the strongest tech, including AI. Because without the right foundations in the right order, these same promising tools can multiply what already exists. And if what exists is chaos, you get chaos at scale.
