PurpleLab is a healthcare data company with a small legal team and no dedicated legal-ops function. As General Counsel, Andrew Lucking needed the team to keep up with growing contract volume without drowning in routine work, and without a heavy tool that would take months to stand up.

Two things were eating time. First, the contracts themselves were scattered and hard to search.

“Our contracts were a mess. They were just in Dropbox folders. It was control-F through Dropbox, like, oh, someone saved it under the wrong name, and you couldn’t find an answer on a substantive thing.”
— Andrew Lucking, General Counsel, PurpleLab

Second, low-value review work was consuming the team. When Andrew made the internal case for a purpose-built tool, the pushback was the one every legal leader hears now: why not just use general AI?

“I need a purpose-built tool. General AI is great and all, but it’s still not as configurable, and on the contract intelligence front it does a pretty poor job if you hook it up to a folder and try to find things. That’s the differentiating factor.”

— Andrew Lucking

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PurpleLab chose Aline because it was turnkey and self-service, not another implementation project. Andrew could build a playbook from his own template and have it running the same afternoon, which mattered for a team without legal-ops staff and with new hires who were not technical.

“The ability to set your template, build a playbook straight from your template, and have that up and running in an afternoon is super valuable. We don’t have a whole dedicated legal-ops function, so something that’s easy to self-serve and self-manage is a huge value add.”

— Andrew Lucking

The team now runs intake through Slack and lets the playbook handle first-pass redlines on routine agreements, so lawyers spend their time where judgment actually matters.

“Redlining NDAs is the dumbest exercise on the planet. Speeding up the routine work and getting to the point where legal judgment is necessary is the use case. You don’t want to spend time on low-value work or chasing documents down. You want to see where you have to make a decision that uses your judgment.”

— Andrew Lucking

The contract intelligence changed how he answers his own questions, too. Instead of hunting through folders, he queries the repository for precedent.

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For a small team, the time savings are material, and the clearest dollar result came from outside counsel. Andrew had been sending client-paper MSAs out for first-pass review. With a playbook built from his own positions, he stopped.

“I was sending client-paper MSAs to outside counsel. After building the playbook, I don’t need to do that anymore. I can run the playbook on the first draft, and it does just as good a job as I would. That’s a use case where I’ve cut about $5,000 a month from my budget.”

— Andrew Lucking

“Even though we’re a small legal department, it’s probably saved 10 to 20 hours a week. The NDA work was taking up a ton of time until we started running the playbook.”

— Andrew Lucking

The bigger picture is capacity. PurpleLab’s contract volume keeps rising, and the legal team is handling it without adding people.

“As our volumes increase, we’re able to do more with less. We don’t need more headcount.”

— Andrew Lucking

The value has spread beyond legal, too. The revenue operations and deal-desk team uses the same contract intelligence for commercial analysis, figuring out what has been sold to whom and at what price. Asked to describe Aline in a sentence, Andrew landed on the phrase that sums it up.

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