“The complexity of our legal function mirrors the complexity of our business,” explains Besma Boumaza, Group General Counsel. “We’re a global community of around 140 lawyers, and the challenge is to operate as one team, with consistency and predictability across everything we do.”

“There’s so much work that comes to an in-house legal team,” says James Donald, General Counsel MEA APAC and Deputy General Counsel Premium Midscale & Economy Division. “Ultimately, we want to use AI to scale the capability of the legal team and elevate our role as a true business partner.”

“The real value is in a tool that supports alignment and brings consistency across a large, distributed legal team,” Besma adds. “Efficiency and alignment are critical for us.”

Building on strong foundations

By the time Accor began evaluating AI tools, the fundamentals were already in place: contract lifecycle management, centralized repositories, global policies, and standardized agreements.

“AI works best when you already have strong foundations,” Besma says. “The right processes, the right policies, the right way of working. This isn’t a fix – it’s something that helps you go further.”

That maturity shaped how the team approached the market. Aurélie Zagori, Head of Legal Operations, led the evaluation process. “We shortlisted two providers and had the chance to extensively trial both, which gave us a really good understanding of how they worked in practice,” she says. “We set up a group of experts who tested the tools over more than six months.”

Three criteria guided the decision. “IT security was an absolute must, given the sensitivity of the data we handle,” Aurélie explains. “Closely linked to that is confidentiality – we needed to be certain that none of our data would be used to train models. The third was ease of use. Lawyers need to be able to get hands-on with a tool quickly and see value straight away.”

That last point proved critical. “If a tool isn’t easy to use from the start, there’s a real risk that people simply won’t adopt it,” she says. “The idea was to meet lawyers where they already work – that’s why Legora’s Word add-in and Outlook integration have been so important.”

Ultimately, the decision came from the team itself. “It wasn’t a top-down decision; Legora was tested across the legal team and chosen by the users,” Besma says.

Driving adoption across a global team

Rolling out Legora across a global legal function required coordination across time zones and ways of working.

“We’re a team spread across every region, so rolling this out meant adapting to very different time zones,” Aurélie says. “We scheduled multiple training sessions with Legora to make sure everyone could participate.”

Adoption was driven as much by peer momentum as by structure. “We created a group of ‘Legora Champions’, starting with the AI legal expert group who had already trialled the solution,” she explains. “When colleagues share how they’ve used it and how much time they’ve saved, it creates real momentum. Even some of the most technology-resistant people became strong advocates once they saw the value.”

That translated quickly into usage. “When I asked the team, around 99% of our lawyers were already using it regularly,” Besma says.

James saw the same pattern: “With a lot of legal tech, there’s a ramp-up in learning the system. That really isn’t the case here. Even technology-phobic people have been really quick to adopt Legora. It’s been a bit of a snowball – the more people use it, the more they want to use it.”

From manual effort to scalable insight

As the platform became embedded in workflows, the impact was immediate.

“Legora really is an accelerator; it increases the pace of work in a very tangible way,” Besma says. “There’s a lot of work that has real value but takes a long time to produce – summaries, analysis, extracting insights. Legora changes that.”

For James, the opportunity was clear from the start: “We saw an opportunity to reduce time spent on repetitive drafting and reviewing – the kind of work that’s very human intensive.”

One feature stood out. “Tabular review was the killer feature for us,” he says. “It’s been really powerful and has replaced a lot of manual, time-intensive work, particularly for large-scale portfolio analysis. Instead of spending hours absorbing information, you can focus on what actually matters.”

The efficiency gains have been significant. “Work that would have taken a huge amount of time, or gone to external counsel, can now be done far more efficiently – in some cases reducing time by 90+%,” he adds.

But the impact goes beyond time-savings. “It’s not just about speed; it acts like a co-pilot,” James says. “You can use it to test your thinking, break down complex situations, and get to the key issues much faster.”

Reducing risk while keeping judgment where it belongs

Beyond efficiency, the platform is helping Accor bring greater structure and control to legal work at scale. “This kind of tool helps us not just streamline work, but have much stronger control over risk,” Besma says. 

“Accountability stays with the lawyers. That doesn’t change,” she says. “It’s about ownership – how we verify, challenge, and stand behind what’s produced.”

Aurélie reinforces the same point. “From the start, we made it clear that the tool would not replace our lawyers or their critical judgment,” she says. “Lawyers remain fully responsible for anything they produce using it.”

Scaling the capability of Accor’s legal function 

As adoption has grown, the impact has moved beyond operational gains to something more fundamental: how the legal function contributes to the business.

“What we want is for our lawyers to focus on the really important work; where they add value and apply their judgment,” James says. “People don’t want to spend their time reviewing NDAs all day. They want to be part of the conversations that shape the business.”

“If Legora helps us remove some of the less critical work and turn things around faster, it gives us more space to focus on the work that really requires strategic judgment,” he says. “So the real shift is moving away from routine work and freeing up space to think about more strategic matters.”

“And this helps shift how the legal function is perceived – from a reactive function to a real driver of business outcomes,” he explains. “It allows us to scale the capability of the legal function rather than just making it more efficient.”

A partnership that evolves with the business

For Accor, a key part of the success of this partnership has been the support provided by Legora. 

“The speed at which Legora evolves to match client needs is genuinely impressive,” Aurélie says. “In a very short space of time, many of the features we discussed have already been implemented,” she says. 

“The pace of development has been incredible. Improvements to tabular review, conditional logic between cells, the ability to query results, and broader format support have all been introduced very quickly.”

“That pace makes it feel like we’re working in the same direction,” she says, “which is what defines a true partnership.”

Measuring impact and looking ahead

“In terms of impact, the strongest quantitative signal is return rate: how consistently people come back to the tool and use it in their day-to-day work,” Aurélie says. “On the qualitative side, the most valuable signal is peer feedback. Almost every week, someone shares how they’ve used it and how much value it’s brought.”

That momentum is now extending beyond the legal team. “We’re now seeing interest from other departments, like risk and audit, who can also benefit from working across large sets of documents,” Aurélie says. “There’s still more to explore, especially in integrating the tool into workflows and processes, but the potential is very clear.”

For James, the long-term impact goes further than efficiency alone. “The real question isn’t just how much time you save,” he says. “It’s what you do with that time. For us, it’s about shifting that capacity into more strategic work that actually moves the business forward.”

For Besma, the principle behind the partnership remains grounded in something simple. “What matters is not just the tool,” she says, “but the people behind it and the support you can rely on.”