“Do you want to build a house with a hammer, or do you want to use a nail gun?”

Jeffrey Marple, Director of Digital Transformation Strategy at KP Labs, smiled after posing the question during a recent webinar, alluding to the choice before legal and compliance teams to stick to traditional tools or explore new technologies.

It’s an important decision to make for teams already stretched thin as the data privacy landscape shifts. New deadlines to comply with updated and upcoming laws including the EU’s GDPR and California’s CPRA are fast approaching, and other governments — in jurisdictions from Colorado, to Virginia, to South Korea, to India — have their own data privacy regulations on the way.

What does this mean for in-house counsel and compliance professionals?

First, there’s the surge in compliance-related work stemming from all of these developments. Salaries for new hires and hourly rates for outside counsel aren’t getting any lower, and budgets aren’t keeping pace with the rising costs of talent and labor.

Second, and even more worrisome for busy lawyers, contract managers, and compliance officers, there’s the long-term implication that data privacy compliance will not be a simple matter of making one-time updates. With new laws and frameworks emerging around the world at every level from the supranational down to the municipal, lean legal and compliance departments need to be agile enough to respond to every new regulatory development in a timely manner.

The status quo of most organizations’ legal and compliance operations simply won’t cut it — especially when you factor other, simultaneous compliance concerns into the picture, beyond data privacy.

That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in.

Manual contract review and management can easily take hundreds of hours when you have thousands of documents to manage. It’s like building a house with a hammer when you could be using a nail gun; it’s better to use the right technology to automate repetitive work so you can focus on higher-value activities.

Reviewing contracts and remediating outdated agreements doesn’t have to be a slog. When all of your contracts are centralized in one location where you can easily search, track, and update clauses across your entire portfolio, compliance ceases to be a matter of putting out fires, and instead becomes a way to proactively prevent problems.

Watch the webinar with KP Labs Director of Digital Transformation Strategy Jeffrey Marple and Evisort EVP Legal & Business Intelligence Memme Onwudiwe to learn how AI can help you confidently navigate regulatory changes.