Top 5 Most Time-Consuming Processes for Legal Teams (And How To Streamline To Stay On Top)

Ask any legal team what slows them down, and the answers are predictable: document review, disclosure schedules, research, issues lists, and discovery. These are the substantive heavyweights. 

But behind the scenes, the real time stealers are project-management related—maintaining closing checklists, coordinating with specialists, finding precedent, and tracking deadlines across multiple systems.

Project Fortress, powered by Salesforce, was designed to solve both. Its platform-first architecture creates a single source of truth, and its workflow-based agentic AI accelerates substantive work. The result? Legal teams—both law firms and in-house—can do more with less, move faster, and keep business momentum alive.

1. Document Review

The challenge: Reviewing hundreds of contracts, leases, and organizational documents is essential but slow. Manually extracting key terms and building diligence charts can take days.

How to streamline: Fortress AI’s diligence review hub automates first-pass analysis, producing charts and memos across subject areas. Attorneys step in where judgment is needed.

For in-house counsel, this capability is a game changer. Early-stage “diligence lite” can be run instantly—even before an IOI or LOI—so corporate development teams have real visibility without engaging outside counsel prematurely.

2. Disclosure Schedules

The challenge: Disclosure schedules are some of the most detail-heavy documents in a transaction. Pulling them together requires meticulous cross-referencing across diligence, contracts, and deal terms.

How to streamline: Fortress brings the entire disclosure schedule process into the platform. Diligence-aware AI assists with preparing and organizing the most detailed schedules, reducing manual effort and ensuring consistency across the deal team.

3. Legal Research

The challenge: Research is fundamental but time-intensive. Attorneys spend hours combing databases or trying to track down memos the firm has already written.

How to streamline: Fortress connects directly to the firm’s DMS and precedent libraries. With context-aware AI, prior memos, briefs, and arguments surface instantly. Research is faster, more consistent, and compounds organically as matters are managed in the platform.

4. Issues Lists

The challenge: Issues lists are often needed at the most urgent stage of a deal—when drafts are flying back and forth and clients want to keep their foot on the pedal. Processing a 100-page redline into a usable issues list can take two days or more. By then, momentum may be lost, and closing deadlines pushed.

How to streamline: Fortress AI’s issues list generator reduces turnaround time by more than 80%. That means faster execution, fewer delays, and no perception that legal is the bottleneck.

For in-house teams, this capability is even more powerful. Issues lists can be generated internally before outside counsel is engaged, giving clients more firepower at their fingertips and enabling them to execute business strategy faster.

5. Discovery

The challenge: Drafting discovery requests and responses is painstaking. Teams spend weeks piecing together facts from the case file and aligning on strategy.

How to streamline: Fortress AI’s discovery generator builds or responds to requests based on the structured facts already in the platform. Attorneys can refine and sharpen arguments, rather than spend days assembling the first draft.

The Hidden Culprit: Project Management Chaos

Substantive work is time-consuming, but the real drag on efficiency comes from project administration:

• Updating closing checklists

• Coordinating with specialists across tax, IP, regulatory, real estate

• Tracking deadlines and communications across multiple systems

• Locating and applying precedent in context

Fortress solves this with a platform-first architecture that consolidates all of the above into a single, Salesforce-powered environment. Workflow-based AI then streamlines the substantive tasks that can otherwise grind matters to a halt.

The Result: Faster Deals, Smarter Litigation, Stronger Outcomes

Organizations using Fortress see immediate impact:

• Manage more matters with the same resources → higher leverage and less burnout.

• Shorter LOI-to-close timelines → legal keeps pace with business strategy.

• 50% fewer turns of drafts → faster closings and smoother client experience.

• Competitive edge for serial buy-side clients → win more bids at LOI stage because legal is no longer a resource drain.

The future of legal isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about velocity and leverage. Fortress delivers both.

This is how legal teams stay on top by staying ahead.