The CML is a 400-person team operating across more than 50 countries, supporting a workforce of over 80,000 people. It handles contract management, legal services, and pre-qualification support for operative units across the entire STRABAG group. And it does so with a deliberately mixed team — lawyers working alongside contract managers who come from engineering backgrounds, each bringing a different technical lens to high-stakes, document-heavy work.

Managing that scale, across that many jurisdictions, with that level of complexity, demands tools that actually work. That's what brought STRABAG to Legora.

"Get Rid of the Boring Stuff"

STRABAG's General Counsel Volker Springer is direct about what the CML needed. The department is full of highly qualified, experienced specialists. The goal was never to stretch them further — it was to stop wasting their expertise on work that didn't need it.

"We have a number of really highly qualified and experienced people and they shouldn't bury it up with administrative stuff. The idea is to get rid of the boring stuff, and to enable my colleagues to do the rather fancy stuff."

The results back that up. STRABAG is already seeing efficiency gains of up to 75% on relevant tasks. At the scale of a 400-person department spanning 50+ countries, that number isn't just meaningful, it's transformative.

A Tool People Actually Want to Use

Adoption doesn't happen by mandate. It happens when a tool removes friction instead of adding it. For the CML team, that meant finding something that fit into how they already work. And for a department whose entire world revolves around documents, that world is Microsoft Word. Gerald Feilecker, Group Manager AI Law and Co-Head of CML Digitalisation, explains why Legora's Word plugin changed everything.

"Adoption depends on friction — for us lawyers and contract managers, Word is the tool we are working with, and the Word plugin of Legora is for people working with documents. It's like love at first sight."

The result is an AI tool that doesn't ask people to change how they work. It meets them exactly where they are, inside the documents they're already in, and makes every part of the process faster.

For Sofia Mårtensson, Head of Legal Sweden and Co-Head of CML Digitalisation, the impact is felt every single day.

"Legora is my work companion. Every day. I cannot see a situation where I work without Legora."

Going Broad From Day One

Many organisations pilot AI cautiously: one team, one use case, one country. STRABAG made a different call.

Rather than testing in one corner of the business, the CML rolled out broadly from the start. Different roles. Different countries. Different disciplines. All involved early.

"We decided to start quite broad, so we involved many colleagues from the start. Different professions, different countries."

That decision paid off. By involving lawyers and contract managers together — people who bring genuinely different technical backgrounds to the same documents — STRABAG built adoption that was deep as well as wide. Not one team using AI, but an entire function moving together.

Strengthening Expertise, Not Replacing It

The CML team is unambiguous about what AI is for. It isn't there to substitute human judgment. It's there to protect the space where human judgment actually gets used.

"The technology is there to strengthen the expertise and the experience of people, not to replace it."

That clarity matters — especially in a department where the work is complex, the stakes are high, and the expertise on the team has taken years to build. AI handles the volume. People handle the judgment. The combination is what makes 75% efficiency gains possible without compromising the quality of the output.

What AI Maturity Actually Looks Like

Gerald offers a clear definition of what it means to do this well.
"AI maturity means moving away from isolated productivity gains into rolling out AI capabilities to a whole organisation."

STRABAG isn't running an experiment. It's building capability at scale — across 50+ countries, across hundreds of professionals. And it's doing it with a clear-eyed view of what the technology is for and what it isn't.

For Volker, the strategic case is equally clear.

"For us at STRABAG, it's very important to be on the forefront of things — not trying to stay put or run behind it, but to be one of the early adopters."

With efficiency gains of up to 75% already visible, a 400-person team now working with AI embedded into their daily workflow, and a rollout philosophy built around breadth rather than narrow pilots, STRABAG isn't just adopting AI. It's showing what it looks like when a large, complex, multinational organisation decides to move seriously — and move together.