For most of legal history, drafting contracts was slow, manual, and deeply repetitive. That was simply how legal work got done. Time spent drafting was time billed, and progress was measured in hours. 

Legal technology set out to change that. And it largely has. 

With automation and AI, generating draft contracts is no longer constrained by lawyer time. It is becoming faster by default. Contracts that once took hours or days now appear in minutes. Many teams report time savings of 60 to 80 percent. By any reasonable measure, speed has delivered on its promise. 

The original aim of speeding up drafting was never to fix contracting. It was to reduce friction, allowing lawyers to spend more time on work that required experience, judgment, and client trust, while still supporting the economics of legal practice. 

Now that drafting is faster with automation and AI, the question is not whether speed was worth pursuing.
 It is what that speed makes possible, and where value shifts next. 

Speed determines how fast work moves. 

Judgment determines whether that work holds up.

What speed changed and what it did not 

In theory, faster drafting should free time for higher value work such as advising clients, negotiating complex points, and shaping deals earlier. 

In practice, the gains show up unevenly. 

Drafting acceleration benefits junior lawyers first. Drafts are produced sooner, but judgment does not develop on the same timeline. Accountability, risk assessment, and final decision making still sit with senior lawyers, and they always will. 

And increasingly, senior lawyers find themselves carrying the growing review burden. 

Where the work and risk now sit 

Faster drafting produces more drafts. 

More drafts require more review. 

Review capacity does not scale in the same way drafting does. Senior lawyers do not gain extra hours when drafting speeds up, and the work they do cannot be automated away without increasing risk. 

AI adds another layer. Because it generates text confidently and not always correctly, time saved in drafting is often re spent verifying output. Lawyers are not just reviewing substance. They are confirming that clauses are appropriate, precedents are real, and context has not been lost. 

As one partner put it, speed does not remove work. It simply moves it upstream, from drafting into review.  

Why speed was always meant to unlock better value 

Drafting quickly has real value, particularly when it reduces friction and supports throughput. But speed alone does not determine outcomes. 

What matters is confidence at speed. Contracts need to be accurate, predictable, and defensible without requiring disproportionate senior oversight. 

That shift in emphasis is subtle but important. It moves the conversation from how fast text appears to how reliably teams can stand behind what they produce, internally and with clients. 

This is where firms begin to differentiate. 

Where judgment can finally scale 

The starting point matters more than the generation speed. 

Strong templates encode experience. They reflect years of negotiation, trade-offs, and decisions about risk. When automated properly with conditions, variations, and guardrails, they produce contracts that are consistent by design. 

That consistency reduces review load. Not because drafts are faster, but because fewer decisions need to be re-made. 

This internal knowledge, including contracts, playbooks, fallback positions, and the rationale behind them, is often fragmented across documents, email threads, and institutional memory. Speed without structure simply accelerates that fragmentation. 

Speed with structure compounds it. 

What speed makes possible for firms 

When drafting and low value review consume less attention, senior lawyers can focus more deliberately on the work that benefits most from experience. This includes negotiating key terms, advising clients, reorganising their knowledge base so traditional expertise such as clauses, fallback positions, and playbooks is easily accessible when needed, and shaping deals earlier rather than fixing issues late. 

It also enables a different kind of thinking: treating contracts not as isolated documents, but as a system. That means identifying patterns, spotting the most negotiated clauses, tracking routinely accepted positions, and understanding where risk concentrates across a portfolio. 

Speedier drafting is a visible benefit of AI. However, the deeper opportunity lies in using it to surface patterns, inform judgment, and strengthen decision-making over time. 

In that sense, drafting speed takes on a broader meaning. It becomes about reaching agreement faster because the contract was better designed from the outset. 

The decisions that matter next 

Once drafting is no longer the primary constraint, attention shifts to: 

• Designing better templates, not more of them 

• Refining fallback language based on real negotiation outcomes 

• Eliminating avoidable negotiation points 

• Shaping deals earlier, with fewer downstream surprises 

These are not just efficiency tweaks, but meaningful substantial decisions. 

The advantage after speed 

Drafting speed is a genuine achievement and an important one. But it was always a starting point, not the destination. 

The firms that pull ahead will be those that recognise where value has moved, toward structure, oversight, and judgment that scales without overwhelming senior lawyers. 

Speed determines how fast work moves. 

Judgment determines whether that work holds up.