OrthoCarolina Streamlines Contracts with Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions

The challenge: a legal team confronting operational bottlenecks

OrthoCarolina, a leading U.S. independent orthopedic practice in the Southeast, faced significant challenges in their contract workflows. Supporting over 150 practitioners and more than one million patient visits annually, the legal team was overwhelmed by contract requests, including employment agreements and vendor and supply contracts.

This influx created operational bottlenecks, leading to delays and inconsistencies that hindered their capacity to meet organizational demands, particularly while also managing other critical legal duties.

Chief Legal Officer Amy Kendall outlined the extent of the problem: “When I first got here, we had an auto-reply feature on our contract intake system that told everyone when they sent in their request for a new contract draft, they could expect to hear back from us in roughly 30 days.”

Key obstacles included:

1. Inefficient drafting processes

Contract creation required legal staff to search through personal shared drives and emails for templates, leading to wasted time and duplicated work.

2. Inconsistent risk assessment

Contracts varied significantly when it came to key clauses like termination provisions and liability language, exposing the organization to unknown risks.

3. Lack of quality control

Without a centralized system, maintaining consistency across contracts was an ongoing challenge, further increasing exposure to risk.

4. Over-reliance on senior attorneys

Routine contracts required senior attorney review, creating bottlenecks and diverting high-value legal resources away from strategic advisory work.

The team needed a solution to streamline their workflow, reduce inefficiencies, and ensure consistent, high-quality contracts.

[Download our Buyer’s Guide to Contract Management Software for practical tips to streamline your search for the perfect solution.]

See how Amy Kendall reduced average contract response time from 30 days to just 7, thanks to Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions.

The solution: Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions

To address these challenges, OrthoCarolina adopted Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions, an advanced AI-powered platform that helps legal teams review contracts with precision and keep pace with the speed of business. Contract Solutions delivered targeted tools to address inefficiencies and enhance the legal team’s workflows.

Centralized repository for contract templates

One of the first changes was creating a single, searchable repository for all contracts, templates, and clauses. The team uploaded their most recently approved standard templates, ensuring they always had access to clean, up-to-date documents.

“We were really intentional in the beginning about putting our standard templates that had been most recently approved into the repository,” said Kendall.

Now, instead of wasting time looking for prior work or the right template, the team can quickly pull pre-approved documents, dramatically speeding up the drafting process.

Fixing risk assessment with AI-powered tools

The AI capabilities of Contract Solutions enabled the legal team to quickly identify and evaluate risks in contracts. The platform flagged problematic provisions and recommended corrections, promoting more informed and efficient decision-making.

“The biggest change is that we’ve been able to use the tool to very quickly go through an agreement, analyze, and call out the biggest pain points with the biggest risk points for the business,” she noted.

By centralizing workflows and standardizing their approach to contract analysis and drafting, the legal team achieved significant efficiency improvements. This streamlined their operations while enhancing the quality and consistency of their legal work.

Standardized quality control measures

Contract Solutions facilitated the development of clause libraries with pre-approved standardized language and fallback options. This approach ensured uniformity in critical areas, such as liability and termination clauses, thereby reducing exposure to hidden risks.

“As a team, we agreed upon the biggest inconsistencies across our contracts that we needed to focus on first,” Kendall stated. “So, as a team, as we’re reviewing an agreement clause, we’re using the tool to build a clause library and we’re consistently going back to what our preferred or acceptable in our fallback language is.”

This standardization elevated the quality and consistency of their legal agreements, while simultaneously streamlining the contract drafting process. By establishing clear, pre-approved language for critical clauses, the team could ensure that every contract met rigorous standards, inherently reducing potential errors and ambiguities. This systematic approach accelerated drafting timelines, as less effort was required for manual review and extensive revisions.

Alleviating the senior attorney bottleneck

The platform empowered less experienced team members to manage a greater share of contract drafting and review, as standardized templates and AI-driven risk assessments reduced the need for senior attorney oversight.

“A hundred percent of contract were coming through the lawyers,” she said. “We’re only nine months in one implementation, but today only 50% of contracts go through senior attorneys. The rest go through paralegals.”

By reallocating routine contract work, this redistribution of tasks freed up senior attorneys to concentrate on higher-value strategic initiatives that require their advanced expertise. This shift not only optimized individual workloads but also improved the legal department’s overall resource allocation and efficiency.

Amy Kendall highlights the operational improvements at OrthoCarolina following the implementation of Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions.