A Healthcare Research Foundation Eliminates Manual Contract Tracking and Avoids $100K+ Hiring Costs with Leah
The a healthcare research foundation, a congressionally established nonprofit organization bridging the national health research institute and private sector partners in biomedical research, faced mounting operational pressures as the organization grew to over 100 employees managing complex multi-party research agreements.
With legacy Agiloft CLM delivering minimal value despite significant investment
Per customization change, creating unpredictable costs and budget planning challenges
Invested in failed Smartsheet implementation over more than a year with no usable product
“We're constantly asking each other: didn't we recently have this clause somewhere? We waste significant time trying to remember where we used specific language instead of focusing on substantive legal work.”
Legal Team Member, Fthe national health research institute
Challenge
The a healthcare research foundation, a congressionally established nonprofit organization bridging the national health research institute and private sector partners in biomedical research, faced mounting operational pressures as the organization grew to over 100 employees managing complex multi-party research agreements.
Despite having a CLM system, the legal department manually tracked contracts in Excel spreadsheets and used Trello cards to provide business visibility—creating redundant administrative burdens consuming substantial attorney time. The most critical operational bottleneck was clause-level searching. Finding specific contract language required manually trying to remember which agreement contained particular clauses, with team members frequently asking each other, "didn't we recently have this clause somewhere?" This memory-based approach wasted hours daily across the 7-8 attorney team.
Version control presented major challenges, requiring lawyers to open multiple PDF files to review original contracts plus amendments rather than viewing consolidated documentation. The intake and triage process was cumbersome, requiring extensive form-filling from business users that led to incomplete requests and back-and-forth communications. Only one team member could pull reports from Agiloft due to prohibitively difficult functionality, preventing self-service analytics.
Rapid organizational growth—adding approximately 40 employees in one year—created process confusion with new hires bypassing legal entirely and sending contracts directly to executive leadership for signature. The team lacked automated obligation tracking capabilities and relied on manual processes that were time-consuming and error-prone. Communication tracking was problematic, with critical contract discussions happening in one-to-one emails excluding necessary stakeholders.
The capacity crisis was acute. Legal leadership recognized that continuing current workflows would require hiring 10 additional lawyers to handle volume growth. The team was overwhelmed by routine policy questions from business stakeholders across HR, Finance, and Operations—representing significant time drain on attorney capacity.
Solution Search
After six years of recognizing that pouring money into expensive Agiloft customizations for a fundamentally outdated system didn't make sense, the contracts administration team initiated a comprehensive evaluation. AI technology had matured enough to warrant choosing innovation over conservative legacy options. The team narrowed 15 vendors to three finalists: Leah, Thomson Reuters, and incumbent Agiloft.
Leah distinguished itself through several key capabilities:
Modern AI-Powered Architecture: The platform delivered clause-level semantic search capabilities eliminating hours spent trying to remember which agreements contained specific language. AI-powered metadata extraction through Leah One-Drop addressed current pain of business users resisting manual data entry. The cognitive search functionality enabled natural language queries across the entire contract repository.
Enterprise Help Desk: AI-powered legal help desk capabilities would deflect routine policy questions from HR, Finance, Operations, and general employees without requiring direct lawyer involvement. The system provided visibility into questions being asked and answers provided, creating intelligence to identify gaps in documentation or areas needing policy development.
Comprehensive Lifecycle Management: Automated obligation tracking with milestone triggers and termination date notifications replaced manual processes. Version control and amendment consolidation with custom naming conventions eliminated the need to open multiple PDFs. The platform supported complex party management needs and multi-signature routing for research agreements involving up to 8 counterparties requiring 20 signatures.
Integration Capabilities: Outlook integration for intake eliminated email-based processes and minimized learning curve for requesters. DocuSign routing handled complex signature workflows. Self-service reporting and analytics across the legal team—not just one administrator—enabled data-driven decision-making.
The team unanimously rated Leah demonstration as the best they'd seen compared to all competitors, specifically highlighting the modern, clean, simple interface versus their Agiloft experience.
“The clause search capability is something I could use frequently in my daily work. Finding specific contract language used to involve great difficulty and manually trying to remember which agreement we used.”
Assistant General Counsel, Fthe national health research institute
Implementation
The foundation approached deployment with lessons learned from previous vendor failures. After being burned by Agiloft B-teams and the Smartsheet catastrophe, the organization prioritized vendor partnership quality and delivery methodology over product features alone.
Leah’s a Big Four firm implementation partnership provided delivery assurance through a dedicated six-person team: project manager, solution architect, configuration lead, contract engineer, legal engineer, and data migration specialist. Weekly implementation calls gradually phased out as the team learned system management, providing a "teach to fish" approach versus ongoing dependency.
The phased deployment strategy started with highest-impact quick wins: intake process through Outlook integration for organizational visibility, followed by repository migration of 2,000 contracts from SharePoint and legacy Agiloft system. The approach prioritized demonstrating immediate value to business users during transition, ensuring their first experience showed the system was better and saved time from the outset.
Data migration required careful handling beyond simple file transfers. The team addressed duplicate vendor records with spelling variations that had never been properly cleaned during initial Agiloft migration, consolidated fragmented contract data across SharePoint and Agiloft, and migrated legal entity information from the previous system. Some legacy documents containing private information required data scrubbing before migration.
Configuration work established three approval chains with up to three steps each (department → finance → legal), covering approximately 15 total approvers across the organization. Contract types spanned program collaborations (70% using internal templates), vendor agreements (30% third-party templates), NDAs, clinical trial agreements, and research partnerships. Multi-party contract records supported up to 8 counterparties with 20 signatures.
A unique challenge was navigating federal compliance requirements. As a congressionally created organization working closely with the national health research institute, all software vendors required the national health research institute IT security approval—a process successfully completed in November 2024. The approval was explicitly contingent on excluding Leah’s AI features from initial scope, as the national health research institute had not approved any AI-type software solutions at that time. The foundation's implementation approach accommodated this regulatory constraint through phased AI adoption pending future federal approval.
Extended user acceptance testing (three weeks versus standard two) and extended hypercare support (three weeks versus standard two) accommodated staffing constraints and potential holiday period challenges. The contract was executed in December 2024, with implementation completed targeting Q1 2025 go-live.
Outcome
The foundation achieved operational status by September 2025, approximately six months post-implementation. The transformation delivered measurable efficiency gains and positioned the organization for sustainable growth without expanding legal headcount.
The most immediate impact came from eliminating manual tracking processes. The legal team retired Excel spreadsheets and Trello drag-and-drop cards, consolidating fragmented workflows across Agiloft, SharePoint, Trello, and email into a single source of truth. Clause-level semantic search eliminated the daily frustration of memory-based contract intelligence, enabling instant retrieval of specific language across the entire repository.
Self-service reporting and analytics capabilities expanded beyond a single administrator to the entire legal team, enabling data-driven decision-making and strategic portfolio analysis. Automated metadata extraction addressed business user resistance to manual data entry, improving data quality and reducing legal team administrative burden.
The AI-powered help desk began deflecting routine policy questions from business stakeholders across HR, Finance, and Operations without requiring attorney involvement. This capability resonated particularly strongly with executive leadership, as it addressed one of the most significant capacity drains on the legal department. Employees could query policies without searching SharePoint for documents they didn't know existed, while legal gained intelligence from question patterns to identify documentation gaps.
The business case centered on headcount avoidance, and the foundation successfully justified the $100,000 annual investment by demonstrating that operational efficiency gains eliminated the need to hire a junior lawyer or associate position. This ROI framework—avoiding a full-time equivalent while handling increased volume from organizational growth—provided clear value demonstration to executive leadership.
"We have the vision, we are excited about where we're going. The investment creates efficiencies that eliminate the need for additional headcount while improving our ability to support the organization's research mission."
— Deputy General Counsel, Fthe national health research institute
Contract cycle time improvements came from Outlook integration for intake and DocuSign routing for complex signature workflows. Automated obligation tracking with milestone triggers replaced manual processes, reducing the risk of missed deadlines or lapsed agreements. Version control and amendment consolidation enabled lawyers to review complete agreement histories without opening multiple PDFs.
The implementation success validated the organization's vendor selection criteria, which had prioritized partnership quality and delivery methodology after previous failures. The transparent pricing model eliminated the budget unpredictability of surprise consulting fees, and the phased deployment approach ensured business users experienced immediate value that sustained adoption momentum.
Looking ahead, the foundation is positioned for Phase 2 expansion opportunities. Additional AI features await the national health research institute approval as federal policies evolve and AI capabilities become more widely accepted in the regulatory environment. Enhanced template libraries, broader contract type coverage, and advanced workflow automation will build on the operational foundation established in the initial deployment. The platform has positioned the legal team to scale alongside organizational growth, focusing on high-value strategic work supporting biomedical research partnerships rather than administrative tasks.
