The COVID-19 pandemic may have more legal departments turning to contract tech for help navigating force majeure clauses or potential opportunities for savings. But don't count on software being swapped for human beings anytime soon. Still, while contract tech may not be reducing the need for legal department head count, it could be influencing the types of skills employers are seeking out.

Dan Broderick, co-founder of the AI-based contract review company Blackboiler, argued for the need of a triumvirate of people, process and technology to solve contract challenges,  possibly due to their still being limits as to what the final item on that list can accomplish. For example, AI contract review software can review an organization's real estate leases for force majeure clauses or pandemic exemptions, but there may be other relevant yet obscure language buried inside of the contract that requires a human's capacity to extrapolate and interpret.

"It's like you have 100 subtasks to get one task complete. And the AI is going to be able to automate 30 of the subtasks, and you are still going to need humans to take care of the other 70% of the subtasks," Broderick said.

How that division of labor will continue to play out within corporate legal hiring remains to be seen. Zach Abramowitz, a consultant in the legal technology space, indicated that many law departments are making a deep understanding of technology in general a priority during the hiring process.

"We are definitely seeing a lot of companies make moves around their contracts right now, so there are going to be systems to implement, so it stands to reason that knowledge of these systems would be a plus," he said.

However, it's not a mortal lock that contract technology skills will land enterprising lawyers a job inside of corporate legal. While Jared Coseglia, founder and CEO of TRU Staffing Partners, doesn't believe that automated contract tech will replace the need for flesh and blood attorneys, he raised the possibility that departments won't be looking to handle all of that work in-house.

"I still think they are going to largely lean on external providers. … I don't know that they are going to look to the outside to higher talent from within that's specialized in contract management. I'd say they'd turn to consulting firms and third part software firms first," Coseglia said.

As a result, most of the hiring he's seen take place in the contract management and automation space has occurred on the service provider or software arena. But that doesn't mean that corporate legal doesn't have personnel needs along those same lines as well.

Mark Yacano, managing director of Major, Lindsey & Africa's transform advisory services group, has noticed an increased demand for contract administrators inside of law departments. Essentially, "people who can configure the system, who can move contracts through the system, who can do a fair amount of the non-lawyer assembly of templates and documents," he said.

But even with personnel installed to help monitor and facilitate contract management workflows, legal departments likely won't be cutting back on attorneys as a result. Instead, Yacano believes the end result will be a reprioritization of resources inside of corporate law.

It will allow legal departments to reallocate how time is used so that lawyers are working on higher value things. It will allow them to enable the business stakeholders to do certain things without necessarily having legal intervention," Yacano said.