As companies scale, contracts rarely stay in one place. Processes change, teams grow, and documents get saved wherever makes sense at the time. For Yelp, that meant contracts had spread across different Google Drives and other apps over the years, with the tech sourcing and procurement team keeping tens of thousands of documents in a mix of shared and personal folders. Copies accumulated, and pulling up a specific agreement took more effort than it should have.

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"They placed all their agreements and supporting docs in G-drive folders with different access rights, and it wasn’t easily searchable. It's very difficult to find anything. There were duplicates, internal memos, team supporting notes, unsigned PDFs and other internal docs. Something had to change."

— said Bill Reilly, Yelp's VP and Deputy General Counsel.

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Bill had been looking for a real repository since 2021. Everything he evaluated was the same - rigid, database-driven software built on old architecture that made you enter exact keywords and structures, broke easily, and did not scale. Then, as AI arrived, the legacy vendors bolted it on and raised their prices.

Yelp chose Aline, an AI-native contract platform, and the bet paid off. Bill's team built a central repository that now holds roughly 30,000 contracts, mostly from procurement and tech sourcing, with another 10,000 or so on the way as business development and other groups come online.

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The difference showed up in the everyday act of finding a document. What used to be a leap of faith became instant.

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"I can find agreements now, and I'm not afraid to go into the 30,000+ repository. Before it was like, one, two, three, going, and hope for the best. Now, if I'm in a workflow myself, I can get that document probably within 20 seconds and download it. Boom. Take a look at it, analyze it. I'm good to go."

— Bill Reilly

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The second capability that changed his work was playbooks. Yelp had none before Aline, just cheat sheets Bill maintained by hand and checked manually, clause by clause. On Aline, he built a full library himself: M&A NDAs, one-way and material non-public information NDAs, and a long tail of the unusual agreements that stop a lawyer in their tracks once or twice a month. Conference sponsorships. Data evaluations. Digital marketing agencies. Hotel room blocks. Influencer deals. Swag commissions. Speaking engagements.

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An M&A NDA that used to take Bill about 30 minutes to redline now takes five.

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"I cranked this out now in five minutes, where before it would have been a half hour. It's like an associate did all the work for me, and then I was just the partner reading through it one more time."

‍— Bill Reilly

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But faster was not the biggest win. Bill's point was that the work also came out better. The playbook allows him to include the “nice-to-haves” and be more thorough.

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"In every instance I've used the playbook, I've put in more protective detail than any other time I would have normally done just by normal drafting. It's spotting the issues that I might not have even thought of. It's definitely protecting Yelp better."

‍— Bill Reilly

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There is one more result that does not fit in a metric, and it is the one Bill said he would lead with. Because Aline is AI-native, features ship in weeks instead of months, and the Aline team is close enough to act on a request in real time. In one instance, Yelp's legal team was being reviewed by its own risk management group when someone asked whether Aline could do something specific. Bill messaged Aline mid-meeting. Aline's founder, Brent, jumped in, and Bill was able to tell the room the feature would roll out in about three weeks.