For too many in-house legal teams, speed is still missing. Reviews drag. Risk assessments stall in inboxes. Valuable time is lost to manual admin instead of driving the business forward.

OneAdvanced -a leading UK software provider with more than 2,000 employees- saw this gap not as a frustration, but as an opportunity. By adopting Wordsmith AI, they’ve turned their legal function into a competitive advantage: cutting review times, stripping away repetitive work, and freeing their lawyers to focus on growth. And they’re already building for the future; embedding playbooks and automation to let the business self-serve routine contracts while legal focuses on the work that really drives impact.

General Counsel Xavier Langlois and Head of Legal Ops Nicole Parker have seen the impact first-hand. For them, Wordsmith AI isn’t just a tool. It’s a shift in how legal operates.

Nicole puts it simply:

“Is like having a trainee solicitor again or paralegal at your fingertips 24/7. I just thought, this is going to this is going to change our world.”

From Manual to Automated

Both Nicole and Xavier describe the same shift: recognising that repetitive legal work can and should be done differently.

For OneAdvanced, every contract has a direct impact on revenue. Speed matters. The more time spent on manual review, the slower deals close and the harder it is to keep pace with customer demand.

Nicole remembers her first experience with Wordsmith:

“Is like having a trainee solicitor again or paralegal at your fingertips 24/7. I just thought, this is going to this is going to change our world.”

The difference was immediate. Routine reviews that once soaked up hours are now completed in minutes. Time once lost to admin is redirected to negotiation, client support, and strategy.

“We spend so much time doing repetitive tasks instead of revenue-generating work […] Wordsmith helps us flip that balance.”

How Wordsmith AI Fits In

Wordsmith AI acts as an intelligent legal assistant. It drafts, redlines, summarises, and routes inbound work. Every action is guided by the team’s playbook and risk tolerance, with humans always in control.

At OneAdvanced, this means:

• Reviewing contracts in minutes instead of hours

• Automating risk checks that once slowed down the pipeline

• Freeing legal to focus on high-value advisory work

• Building clear risk profiles across deals and clients

• Embedding playbooks so business teams can self-serve

• Streamlining procurement by accelerating contract turnaround and supplier onboarding

  
  

As Nicole explains:

“What used to take two, four, six hours, we’ll be able to take 10, 20, 30 minutes or an hour with that human oversight review.”

The Legal Tech Stack Is Changing

For OneAdvanced, Wordsmith AI is not just another tool. It is becoming part of the core infrastructure that powers the legal function.

Xavier puts it clearly:

“I think AI will underpin and power all the workflows that the team does. It will power all of the routine tasks that team does. It will power things like legal research, drafting, and even how you support the business.”

This shift is bigger than efficiency. It is about repositioning legal as a driver of growth rather than a bottleneck.

As Xavier sees it:

“So I think that’s where the magic comes together and where, again, in a couple of years time, we should all, as legal teams be able to do a lot more with a lot less and drive and show a lot more value than was ever possible before.”

Looking ahead, that vision could also include intelligent agents handling routine workflows, coordinating tasks across systems, and freeing up lawyers to focus on higher-impact work.

Adoption Is About Frustration, Not Just Vision

Change management is often seen as the hardest part of adopting new legal tech. But at OneAdvanced, Wordsmith AI spread quickly for a simpler reason: the team was already frustrated with doing things the hard way.

Nicole admits she expected more pushback:

“I really expected it to be a bit of a hesitance to make this change, but it just shows you how frustrated the team were at doing certain things..”

As adoption grew, so did the perception of legal inside the business.

Xavier reflects on this shift:

“I think there’s very much still a view that legal is a cost center. But I think in this day and age, legal teams are true value drivers.”

Legal, at the Speed of Business

OneAdvanced is already seeing Wordsmith AI make a difference in day-to-day operations. But Nicole and Xavier are focused on what comes next.

Nicole envisions a world where playbooks embedded into Wordsmith AI allow the business to self-serve:

“I’m really excited about the fact that we are building the playbooks into Wordsmith which means that the business can self-serve and that to us, again, when we tell the commercial team that there’s a world where they won’t have to review every single contract, it’s it just completely brightens everyone’s day.”

Xavier sees the stakes for the industry as even higher:

“I think general counsels should be terrified of not using it, as opposed to being worried or terrified of using it.”

Human-in-the-Loop, by Design

Both leaders are clear: Wordsmith AI is not about replacing lawyers. It is about enhancing them.

Xavier calls it a tool that “kills writer’s block” when starting a policy, clause, or redline. Nicole compares it to a trainee or paralegal who never sleeps.

But in every case, humans remain the decision-makers.

“As much as you want to be able to trust the tools, you always need that human oversight at the end, I don’t think anyone should take any output as gospel just yet, or never for that matter.”

Building Together

Both Nicole and Xavier highlight the Wordsmith team itself as a reason adoption has been so smooth.

Nicole explains:

“they’ve come in really quickly and understood the problems that we have and they be open to discussing it with us. You know, brainstorming ideas with us and helping us.”

The collaboration even extended to a joint internal Legathon, designed to get more of the legal team experimenting and engaged.

“So it’s it’s the commercial team in the main that have started to utilize this. But as they are getting more and more used to it, they’re becoming real champions for the change. And that is starting to make the rest of the team really want to look at it.”

Final Thoughts

Legal teams have always struggled to match the pace of the wider business. OneAdvanced is proving that does not have to be the case.

With Wordsmith AI, they are automating the repetitive, accelerating the complex, and focusing on what matters most: enabling the business to move faster, with less risk, and more control.