How a Two-Person Legal Team Handles Enterprise-Scale Document Review and Redlining with Lito, the AI Legal Agent
A real estate capital management firm managing nearly $8 billion in investments across joint ventures, purchase and sale agreements, and large-scale development contracts runs its entire legal operation with one counsel and one paralegal. By adopting Litera’s Lito alongside Litera Compare, the team reduced manual contract review effort, accelerated turnaround times, and extended contract intelligence directly to business users.
The Challenge
More contract questions than a two-person team could answer
For years, the legal department ran lean and ran well. One counsel and one paralegal supported a national portfolio of joint ventures, land development deals, and purchase and sale agreements. The team reviewed contracts, delivered risk guidance to stakeholders, and kept the work moving without strain.
That changed as deal volume grew. Business teams began turning to legal more often, asking the team to compare short term sheets against lengthy purchase and sale or joint venture agreements to pull out specific commercial terms. Every request pulled the team away from the risk analysis and strategic guidance the business needed most. The work was piling up, and the team had no margin to absorb it.
On top of the business user requests, the team handled everything else too — proofreading, document cleanup, summarizing agreements, and translating contract language into guidance the business could act on. Every one of those tasks landed directly on the same two people. The team had no enterprise budget for a large-scale contract management platform, and the tools available for in-house legal were built for departments with far more resources and far broader mandates. The team needed a solution sized for their workload and budget.
The Solution
How Lito Met the Unique Needs of This Legal Team
Lito, the AI Legal Agent, excelled where other enterprise platforms failed. It was priced and structured for legal teams that needed powerful contract review capabilities without the overhead of a broad, all-encompassing suite. The legal team implemented Lito together with Litera’s drafting tools, enabling automated document proofing, cleanup, review, and redlining, all while maintaining their established contract review processes.
“As a small inhouse legal team, we run very lean. We don’t have the overhead to add more personnel, so we rely on technology to help us produce more work product, faster.”
— InHouse Counsel, Real Estate Development Company
A few of the capabilities they leveraged most are:
- Lito Grid built customizable comparisons that pulled business-critical terms from complex agreements quickly and consistently, replacing manual document-by-document review
- Review Terms accelerated issue-spotting across lengthy contracts, eliminating time-consuming searches for defined terms
- Litera’s drafting tools and Litera Compare caught typos, identified inconsistencies, redlined, and cleaned up documents earlier in the review process, reducing the need for a second set of eyes
- AI-assisted summaries and risk insights gave the team a strong starting point for stakeholder communication, replacing the process of drafting guidance from scratch
“Grid functionality has been especially valuable. It gives us more concise, structured insights and helps reduce the manual effort that typically slows us down.”
— InHouse Counsel, Real Estate Development Company
The flexible licensing model extended Lito access to business users directly, allowing deal teams to run their own comparisons and extract key commercial terms without routing every request through counsel. The shift reduced bottlenecks and gave legal the space to focus on the analysis and risk guidance the business needed most.
The Results
From document administration to strategic guidance
Lito changed what the legal team had time for. The team now handled time-consuming tasks, from reviewing documents for typos to hunting for defined terms, in a fraction of the time. The recovered capacity went directly toward the work the business needed most: risk analysis, stakeholder guidance, and contract strategy.
“Lito allows us to bring AI not just to legal, but to senior business stakeholders who need visibility into key terms — without forcing them to read hundreds of pages.”
— InHouse Counsel, Real Estate Development Company
Contract comparisons became faster and more consistent. Using Lito’s Grid, the team extracted key business terms from complex agreements with concise, structured outputs rather than the lengthy multi-page summaries that had slowed stakeholder communication in the past. When deal teams needed to compare a term sheet against a purchase and sale or joint venture agreement, the answer came back faster and in a format the business could use without additional explanation.
The business user extension proved to be the most significant operational shift. With Lito licenses extended to deal teams directly, business users ran their own comparisons and extracted key commercial terms without routing every request through counsel. The legal team shifted from fielding document requests to delivering risk guidance and strategic analysis. That shift is ongoing. As deal volume grows, the team continues to find new ways Lito can support the broader contract review workflow.
“Lito helps us focus our time where it matters most — advising the business — instead of getting stuck in administrative or repetitive review work.”
— InHouse Counsel, Real Estate Development Company
See how Lito supports lean in-house legal teams. Request a demo.
