Contracting in the Age of AI: What Legal Professionals Need to Do to Keep Pace with Rapid Change

We had the pleasure of interviewing Joost Bokhorst, Senior Legal Manager at CyberArk, who will also be speaking at Future Contracts London on 10th December 2025.

Joost is an IT lawyer with over a decade of experience across private practice and in-house roles. He is driven by a passion for enhancing the impact of in-house counsel, with a strong focus on contract negotiation, business partnering, and leveraging legal operations, technology, and design to create smarter, more effective processes.

In this interview, Joost discusses how contract management is evolving and what legal professionals need to do to keep pace with rapid change.

He will be sharing further insights during the panel “The Rise of the Autonomous Contract Stack”, joining other leading experts at Future Contracts London.

Enjoy the interview!

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Do you believe the legal industry is innovating fast enough, or is it still resistant to meaningful change?

I believe the legal tech industry is innovating faster than the legal industry itself. As a result, the supply of legal tech seems to be exceeding actual demand. The wide range of (often young) solutions makes it challenging for legal teams to identify the right technology, adopt it properly, and translate it into meaningful change.

Driving meaningful change also requires a significant time investment, while the legal industry is known for its heavy workload. Still, if we want to keep up with the fast-changing world we operate in, we need to create space to innovate the way we work.

In short, I don’t think the legal industry is resistant to change, but change - especially meaningful change - is undeniably challenging.

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In your opinion, to what extent should legal professionals be expected to understand technology as part of their core skillset?

Understanding technology is crucial, but the focus should be on what truly matters to us as legal professionals. We need to understand the benefits technology can offer, what it requires from us to deliver those benefits, and the risks it introduces. In other words, our core responsibility is to understand the required input and the desired output of technology.

Yes, having a basic understanding of what happens in between can help, but there are people far better qualified to handle that part. I would therefore encourage legal professionals to team up closely with colleagues in operations and IT -  we don’t need to do this alone.

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Do you believe the legal sector will eventually shift from reactive advice to proactive, data-driven guidance?

I like to think that the legal sector is, by nature, designed to be proactive. That’s why we maintain templates, circulate policies, and issue codes of conduct - these are all proactive tools. The challenge is that we can’t foresee everything that will come our way, and we never will.

What we can do is identify patterns to understand what we should reasonably expect. That’s where data becomes essential. If we track the work we perform and what triggers that work, we gain insights into where we can make the most impactful changes and how we can deliver a more proactive service.

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Why has contract lifecycle management been such a difficult category for companies to adopt successfully? What factors do you believe play the largest role in preventing CLM initiatives from delivering their expected value?

The biggest challenge with CLM is that it has evolved from a relatively simple contract repository into a full one-stop shop - from contract creation, review, and signature to storage, extraction, and even prediction. Today’s legal tech market reflects that shift: on one side, many start-ups focus on a specific part of the contract lifecycle; on the other, larger vendors offer an end-to-end CLM platform.

The challenge with full-suite CLM solutions is that it’s extremely difficult to excel across all parts of the lifecycle in a way that fits the needs of the entire legal industry. But using multiple smaller, specialized tools creates its own problems because they’re often hard to integrate with each other and with broader non-legal systems.

And we shouldn’t underestimate the impact of CLM initiatives on the Legal department, but also other departments like Finance and Sales - which makes alignment and adoption even more complex.

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Looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges for in-house lawyers over the next few years?

Although we shouldn’t overlook the impact of legal design thinking and standardization, I believe technology - including, of course, AI - offers the biggest opportunities for in-house lawyers to work smarter, more efficiently, and more impactfully. Adopting new technologies is imperative if we want to keep pace with the organizations we support. That makes realizing these opportunities not a nice-to-have, but a must. And that creates the two biggest challenges ahead.

First, we need to understand and use technology in a way that actually allows us to benefit from it. We need to understand the desired outputs it can produce and the required inputs we must provide to make that possible.

Second, once the technology is in place, we shouldn’t assume we can lean back and let it do the work for us. It’s easy to underestimate how much time and effort it still takes to correct errors, maintain quality, and continually update the input so the output stays relevant.

If we stay mindful of these challenges, I’m confident that technology will bring in-house teams the most significant improvements we’ve seen to date.

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