Lakeside's contracts had piled up over a decade with no single owner. "There was a little bit of disorganization," Brian said. "They hadn't had in-house counsel in about a year, and before that, there was no central contract repository. Everything was scattered all over the place when I joined."

Brian had been here before. Across earlier roles, he had evaluated or lived with a range of contract tools, and none of them fit. "You try a lot of tools that just don't do what's promised, or have too much bloat. Too much in there that you don't use or need, or they're just more complicated than they need to be."

He had also been burned by tools that promised AI but never delivered the flexibility he wanted. "It had basic metadata pulling. But if I wanted to dive into things that were of interest to me instead of who the parties were and the start and end date, it was really difficult."

And the heavier enterprise options came with the opposite problem. "The implementation was a months-long process that cost a lot of money, and I needed to talk to people on a schedule. I needed something I could subscribe to and, by the next morning, already be looking at my contracts myself."

Brian found that middle ground in Aline. With a software engineering background (he wrote code for a decade before spending 20 years in IP and tech law), he wanted a tool he could run himself, at his own pace, with AI capable of doing real legwork.

"Aline was the sweet spot where, in my trial, I could just drag and drop my contracts in and create reports. It was easy."

Using Aline, Brian can:

- Consolidate contracts from across the business into one accessible source of truth

- Run reporting with plain-language AI prompts, using pre-built queries or his own, "as complex as you want to make them"

- Pull risk, obligation, and compliance snapshots across the entire contract portfolio

- Analyze decade-old customer MSAs carrying a dozen amendments each, in minutes

- Export results to Excel and share them across his security, compliance, and IT teams

- Get going with zero IT involvement and no implementation specialist

The deciding factor was flexibility paired with real capability. "What Aline does really well is let me segregate and organize contracts, then create custom querying to get a snapshot of the risk or obligations across a set of contracts, just using AI prompts. The power is being able to tell it exactly what you want and how to get there."

One source of truth. Contracts that once lived scattered across the business now sit in a single, searchable repository, giving Lakeside visibility it simply did not have before.

Months of work, done in minutes. "It would be a full-time job for months to get a full view of what our contracts historically obligate us to. Customer contracts going back 10 years, MSAs with 12 different amendments. Being able to pace through all of that and get a full picture is really difficult without some help."

Live the next morning, on his schedule. "You can do it on your schedule, which is the thing I hate about implementing software. You have to stick to a project plan and a timeline. That doesn't work for in-house counsel. I never know what I'm doing that day until I start logging in, and then it changes. Aline helps me move at my pace, which is usually really fast."

Support that shows up. "The chatbot is great. I was asking the AI chat a question one night, and it said it couldn't find the answer. Then, all of a sudden, Brent replied. It was 1 am on a Friday. It was an issue I'd found, and he jumped right in."

Ready for what's next. With clear visibility into obligations and commitments, Brian can keep Lakeside compliant today and prepared for any due diligence down the road.

"Easy to use, intuitive. You don't need your IT department, you don't need to talk to an implementation specialist. Any legal team of pretty much any size can do what they need to do."

Brian Arnold, In-House Counsel, Lakeside Software