The status quo
A typical Mittelstand legal department today looks like this: one to three qualified lawyers, often with an assistant. Contracts sit on the file server in a folder structure that has grown over the years. Deadlines live in an Excel file or in Outlook, depending on who started maintaining them when. Dunning notices are written by accounting; for disputed ones you get pulled in. The Art. 30 GDPR record of processing was set up in 2020; it gets updated when something big happens.
What's missing is not legal knowledge — you have that. What's missing is the tool with which the same tasks get done with half the friction.
A typical day — before and after
Before
9:00 — Supplier contract: open PDF, read through clauses, build a comment list in Word, email procurement. 11:00 — Management question on a termination: look up BGH case law, open Beck-online, call the external lawyer for confirmation. 14:00 — Sign off three level-2 dunning letters. 16:00 — GDPR request from a former employee: set the access deadline, gather the data, draft the response. 17:30 — Maintain the Excel deadline list.
After
9:00 — Upload contract, AI extracts clauses and proposes comment points. You review, supplement, comment in the platform; procurement sees the comments directly in the same system. 11:00 — AI research in the knowledge graph with verified BGH case references; external lawyer only for the strategic question. 14:00 — Dunning level 2 is one click per receivable, automatically calculated including interest. 16:00 — Access request is filed as a workflow in DPMS, deadline set automatically. 17:30 — Deadlines need no maintenance because they emerge automatically from contracts and inbox.
What changes concretely
Contract review
Standard contracts can come to you pre-reviewed: the AI extracts metadata and anomalies on import. You focus on what deserves legal attention — not on reading the third similar supplier agreement this week. More under Feature · Contract Management.
Research
Instead of stacking Beck-online and Google search, you query the tenancy specialist directly inside the matter. They deliver verified BGH decisions with case references from the case law database — no fabricated references. For complex questions you still write the argumentation yourself; the AI delivers the sources. More under Feature · AI Assistance.
Correspondence
Standard letters (dunning notices, terminations, confirmations) appear as DIN 5008-compliant drafts in seconds. You review and send — including INTERNETMARKE postage directly from the system. Saves several minutes per letter; with 15 letters per week that compounds to a substantial fraction of a position. More under Feature · Correspondence.
DPMS Planned
Record of processing, DPA management, data subject rights and incident response will get their own optional add-on module — currently in planning, not yet included in beta access. Target: data protection compliance no longer runs in five Excel tables but as a living system with audit trail. We capture your requirements for prioritization, more under Feature · DPMS.
What does not change
You remain the qualified lawyer who bears professional responsibility. LEGALinhouse makes no decisions you would make — it prepares them. For contested proceedings, M&A support or special-law questions, you bring in external counsel because you do today. LEGALinhouse makes the handover faster — the lawyer gets a clean matter with documents and can do hourly-rate-worthy work, instead of first reconstructing the file.
Team of 1 to 5
LEGALinhouse scales with your team. For a solo in-house counsel, the platform is the only system besides email; for a team of four or five, tenant isolation, roles, coverage assignments become relevant. External advisors (e.g. the external lawyer) can be brought in with default-deny access — they see only what you have approved. More under Security · Access & Permissions.
Sounds like your reality? Request beta access — we set up a test tenant where you can work with your own contract data.