Partner Spotlight: Heidrick & Struggles

As a global leader in executive search and leadership consulting, Heidrick & Struggles helps top organizations build high-performing teams. But behind the scenes, their lean yet mighty legal team faced a growing challenge: navigating contract reviews on a global scale without sacrificing quality, so they turned to AI to work smarter.

By integrating AI solutions, they streamlined their contract review process, freeing legal talent for higher-value work, and strengthening their role as a true business partner. Now, their legal function operates with greater efficiency, consistency and strategic impact.

We spoke with Alexis Greasley, Assistant General Counsel, to learn how Robin AI impacted their legal function.

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The Challenge: A Lean Team with a Global Workload

At Heidrick & Struggles, every team is built for excellence, and their legal team is no exception. But with just 7 lawyers supporting the commercial side of the business globally they needed to find ways to maximise efficiency.

Two Key Challenges:

• Heavy Contract Workload: The volume of contracts they needed to review.
• Inconsistency: Each lawyer marking up contracts in a slightly different way.

They needed a smarter way to operate.

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The Solution: AI Stepped Up

They took a forward-thinking approach with Robin AI’s Managed Services — a service that combined expert legal professionals with cutting-edge AI to streamline contract workflows. Robin AI handled:

• Executive search agreements
• NDAs
• Consulting agreements
• Vendor agreements
• Data Processing Agreements (DPAs)

The creation of custom playbooks for each type of agreement led to an aligned negotiation framework that enhanced consistency and efficiency.

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The Results: A Smarter, More Strategic Legal Team

Robin AI helped to streamline Heidrick & Struggles' contract review process — reducing workload, ensuring high accuracy and delivering value.

The median turnaround time for Robin managed services on Heidrick & Struggles documents is 5 hours and 12 minutes.

Three Key Wins

1. Invisible AI, Visible Impact: With Robin AI seamlessly embedded into their workflow, legal teams deliver faster results without disrupting business operations.
2. Global Coverage: With a global firm that operates across time zones, business never stops — and they needed a partner that mirrored that.
3. Consistent, Reliable Contract Markups: AI now handles the majority of the routine contract markups, allowing lawyers to focus on the critical clauses that truly require negotiation.

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The Benefits: A More Strategic, Business-Driven Legal Team

More Strategic Business Involvement: “The expectation on in-house lawyers is so much more than just being in the legal lane. It’s being a commercial, strategic business partner.”

Enhanced Talent Retention: “Contract reviews can be repetitive, and having a tool that redlines the fundamentals and enables our lawyers to focus more on higher risk and value work is better for everyone. We want to give our people the ability to have time to do more and learn more.”

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Final Advice: Embracing AI for a Smarter Legal Function

For legal teams considering AI, Heidrick & Struggles’ Alexis Greasley offers these key takeaways:

1. Trust and Accuracy Matter – Select a solution that delivers reliable, high-quality contract analysis.
   
2. AI Should Enhance Human Expertise – AI solutions should work alongside lawyers, to allow lawyers to focus their attention on the critical points that have the biggest impact on the business.
   
3. Smart Investments, Bigger Returns – When it comes to legal tech, cost alone shouldn’t drive decisions — value should.

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Looking Ahead: The Future of AI in Legal Teams

By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, the team delivers efficient and consistent contract reviews whilst freeing up valuable time to collaborate more closely with internal stakeholders on other strategic projects.