“In large-scale projects, everything is individual,” says Volker Springer, General Counsel at STRABAG. “There’s no one project that is the same as another. And because of that, there is constant interaction around contracts. Legal and contract management becomes vital. Not to start fights, but to help to settle things in an amicable way and keep projects moving.”

That posture is central to how Springer thinks about the role of legal counsels and contract managers inside the business. STRABAG’s interdisciplinary team for Contract Management and Legal Services (CML) spans around 400 people across more than 25 countries. For Springer, this footprint is both demanding and deeply rewarding. “You learn so much about how to work with people in different environments, with different legal frameworks, and different ways of operating.”

Enabling, not obstructing

After more than 20 years at STRABAG, Springer has seen the organisation evolve significantly. While STRABAG is legally a listed group, he still feels the roots of its family-business heritage, built by the Haselsteiner family and shaped by long-term thinking. That sense of responsibility is what keeps him there. “You can still sense the family business here,” he reflects. “And in the last five years especially, the drive toward innovation, digitalisation, and sustainability has been real. We’re not pretending to do it. We really want to walk the talk.”

Springer never set out to become a lawyer to block progress. He was always drawn to the idea of questioning assumptions and breaking complex problems into manageable parts. What still motivates him is the ability to enable others. “You can work as a lawyer making problems, or you can work as a lawyer enabling things,” he says. “I always chose to enable.”

That same realism shapes the way he approaches transformation in legal and contract management. Before adopting AI, the pressure building inside CML wasn’t rooted in a lack of capability or commitment, but in the growing volume of work that simply had to be done. In recent years, Springer has watched regulation accelerate, especially in Europe, and much of it lands directly on legal teams first. He points to data regulation as one major driver, beginning with GDPR and continuing through the Data Act and the AI Act, alongside what he describes as a shift from “soft law” to “hard law” in ESG. “CSRD, deforestation regulation, all kinds of topics that became hard law,” he says. “There’s a lot of standardised work that comes with that.”

Embedding new ways of working

For Springer, areas like data processing agreements illustrate the problem clearly. Legal teams must review contract terms that are highly structured and, in many respects, dictated by regulation. The work is essential. It must be performed rigorously. But it is also repetitive, and repetition has a cost. “We needed a lot of people doing jobs which have to be done, but which are not the jobs people want to be doing each and every day.”

The strategic risk isn’t that standardised work exists. It’s that it expands to the point where it crowds out the work only experienced contract managers and legal professionals can do: judgement, negotiation, creative problem-solving, and proactive partnership with the business. “If you want to act creatively, if you want to focus, you need sufficient capacities,” Springer explains. “The idea was taking out the rather boring and standardised stuff, and enabling my people to do what they should do, which is real contract management and legal work.”

That’s where AI supporting CML’s workflows came into the picture. STRABAG began by identifying processes where standardisation was already present, and where scaling quality and consistency mattered. Data protection work became an early focus. Springer describes starting in Germany with a small group, building from templates toward playbooks and more structured workflows, with the intention of rolling that approach out across STRABAG’s data protection colleagues. The aim was not to experiment with AI for experimentation’s sake, but to create a data culture and build something repeatable that could become “the way we do it.”

Trust your gut 

When Springer began evaluating AI solutions, he had two non-negotiables. The first was the legal framework: data protection, confidentiality, and reliability are table stakes. The second was people. He wanted partners who were passionate enough to build with STRABAG, and credible enough to be trusted over the long term. “It’s difficult,” he says, “to find the right people and see if they really live up to what they say.”

Springer and his digitalisation team first met Legora in Stockholm around a year ago when the company was 40 people strong (now at 300+). But size wasn’t what he noticed. “What we sensed pretty early was there is a lot of passion, a lot of drive,” he recalls. He remembers discussions about hallucinations and data integrity, not as abstract talking points, but as proof points for how seriously a team takes the responsibility of building AI for lawyers and contract professionals. What he felt, he says, was trust. “Honestly speaking, it’s a gut feeling,” he admits. “But we had a very strong sense that Legora was not pretending. They are really doing it, and they put everything into it.”

From experiment to infrastructure

But the decision to partner with Legora was only the beginning. For Springer, implementation is where AI either becomes real or becomes shelfware. And STRABAG chose an approach that deliberately prioritised early adoption across the function. “Advisors tell you to only look for a few challenges, have use cases to solve, and do that,” he says. “We changed that a little bit, with the idea to facilitate our change process.” 

Instead of limiting use to a small pilot group with only a few selected persons, STRABAG involved people from across legal, contract management, central pre-qualification, and assistant-level roles. Use cases were gathered, working groups formed, and the tool was put into the hands of real users quickly. 

The logic was straightforward: long-term change requires familiarity, not just a business case. “Our idea was to onboard quite a lot of people so that they get used to it and see the upsides, even on a low level for the simpler tasks executed on a regular basis,” Springer explains. That “low level” matters more than it sounds. Having a draft checked, improving tone, doing quick research, running translations. These are everyday tasks and they’re often where adoption can live or die. Springer’s view is that if people begin to experience Legora as useful in daily work, it becomes far easier to embed it into deeper workflows later. “We triggered quite a lot of people to start working with Legora at a very early stage,” he says. “And to me, this is what will help us towards full-blown change.”

Expanding scope

That change will be visible in 2026. STRABAG is increasing its Legora deployment from 200 to 400 licences, meaning effectively the whole CML function will have access. Springer is realistic about what that scale means culturally. “Like always in life, there are a few people who are enthusiasts,” he says. “Some people are positive. And there are people who are more skeptical.” Building momentum across that spectrum requires internal champions, and Springer credits key colleagues for steering the programme with energy and consistency. But it also requires a partner who shows up. On that front, Springer is clear about what stood out in the collaboration with Legora.

“It’s cooperation in the best sense of the world,” he says. “Not telling you, ‘Now I’m the provider and I’m doing this.’ There’s a strong wish for cooperation. There’s a lot of passion to work on it together.” STRABAG brings ideas, Legora brings ideas, and the teams discuss them intensely. Springer sees the relationship as inherently reciprocal, and strategically so. “We even try to add value to Legora’s further development,” he notes, “because it helps us quite a lot in the end.”

He was also surprised by the pace. Legal tech implementations are rarely known for speed, but Springer describes a “tight schedule” for improvements and updates that exceeded expectations. Just as importantly, the experience has been user-friendly. “For all software tools this is a must-have,” he says. “As soon as it gets complicated, nobody likes to do it. You get the enthusiasts and the IT nerds, but mostly, everybody wants it to be easy.”

Real results

When it comes to impact, Springer is careful not to overclaim. CML is still early in some workflows, still learning where the tool fits best, still defining what becomes mandatory and what remains optional. But there are already clear signals of impact. In data processing agreements, he says, “CML has seen efficiency improvements of up to 80%, so that’s not marginal, that changes how people work every day.” In research, drafting, and refinement of legal language, he also sees meaningful gains, amplified by the fact that Legora meets lawyers where they work. “Having Legora embedded with a Word add-in is magic for lawyers,” he says with a smile. “Lawyers are Word-driven.”

For Springer personally, research is one of the strongest use cases. He describes using Legora to quickly understand legal environments, for example health and safety law in an unfamiliar country, and then following the sources through to official authority pages to validate the information he’s been given by Legora. “That combination of speed plus traceability is what builds confidence. It’s a big advantage, getting an overview,” he says, “and then knowing which direction we can take that in.”

Opening the gate, responsibly

Looking ahead, Springer sees two shifts defining how STRABAG will use Legora. The first is the move from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” in selected workflows. “My aim for 2026 is not simply that the tool exists and people optionally use it, but that specific processes are redesigned so Legora becomes part of the work itself. “It’s not a ‘Here it is, have fun.’ Instead we want to take specific use cases and work with Legora, so that it is part of a real work process,” he says.

The second is expansion of Legal AI beyond the legal team, but in a controlled, responsible way. Today, Legora is used for CML, STRABAG’s legal and contract management community, but Springer is already in active conversations about how STRABAG might eventually roll out Legora-enabled pathways beyond this. He is cautious about what that should look like, and clear on what it should not look like. “You can easily open the tool for everybody,” he says. “I’m not a super fan of that though. Legora is an AI tool for lawyers and contract professionals. To open the gates for everybody and then have people think they can do highly sophisticated contract checks, that is a tough one.”

This is why he is particularly interested in the Legora portal. STRABAG has not yet started the portal exercise, but plans to begin imminently. For Springer, it solves a structural problem: either you restrict usage to lawyers and contract managers, or you throw the doors open. The portal offers a third route, allowing STRABAG to “open the gate” to Legora in a steered, defined way, giving the wider business access to specific pathways without encouraging overreach. “Opening a portal enables wider access to specific issues, in a checked environment is a very positive aspect,” he says. “To me, the portal is a good possibility to open Legora up, but to do it in a steered way.”

Springer also points to regulatory tracking as a future frontier, particularly as EU-level regulation continues to accelerate. In his conversations with other general counsel, he says one theme that keeps appearing is 2026 being a year where teams worry about being flooded by new obligations, and struggling to keep track, interpret, and implement what’s coming. “To have a regulatory tracker,” he says, “would help us to see what’s coming up more easily, and help us translate it for the group.”

Space to work on the real stuff

Behind all of this is a simple definition of success. Springer does not measure success by tool usage alone. He measures it by whether his team is spending more time on high-value work, and whether their legal counsels and contract managers are strategic to the business. “I want my people working on the real stuff,” he says. “We have highly qualified people, and I do not want them to be buried in administrative work. I do not want them to do the boring stuff. They should work on topics so they can add value on our high-profile construction projects, on M&A, on everything we do.”

He is also clear that the purpose is not headcount reduction. The goal is capacity creation and better outcomes. In that model, AI becomes an enabler of professional growth as well as business performance. Springer believes this shift will matter for recruitment and retention, particularly among younger lawyers and contract managers, who increasingly expect modern tools and modern ways of working. In interviews, he says, mentioning that STRABAG works with legal AI providers consistently sparks interest.

At the same time, he is thoughtful about what this means for early-career development. If AI absorbs more of the routine work, lawyers and contract managers still need to learn fundamentals. Springer sees an upside and a downside. Tools can accelerate learning once you have the foundations, but they can’t replace foundations. “All the tools we offer don’t mean you should cut corners,” he says. “If you want to be good at something, you need to work on it. You need to understand how it works. And then, using a tool helps you become faster, more efficient.” The risk is relying on machines without judgement, and Springer is firm that STRABAG’s culture must remain grounded in professional rigour.

Riding the wave

Ultimately, Springer’s philosophy comes back to partnership. Partnership with the business, with the profession, and with change itself. He describes legal AI as a disruptive force and uses a metaphor he often shares with others: “The disruption of AI is like a wave in the ocean, and you have a choice. You can just stay in the water and watch the wave coming closer and closer, you can dive beneath it, or you can choose to ride it. In the first case, there is a high risk that the wave will knock you down,” he says. “Diving under, you might survive, but it won’t help forever. The best option is to ride the wave confidently.”

At STRABAG, that’s exactly what he’s setting out to do. And with scaling Legora from 200 licences to 400 in 2026, with deeper workflow adoption underway, and with the portal poised to open new, controlled pathways for the wider business, STRABAG’s approach suggests something bigger than an implementation story. It’s a blueprint for how a large, complex organisation can modernise legal without losing what makes legal and contract management valuable in the first place: judgement, trust, and the ability to enable progress.