LegalTech Diaries Volume 19
Ben Freeman
Founder & CEO
Omnea
LegalTech Diaries Volume 19
Ben Freeman
Founder & CEO
Omnea
What did you notice about the way legal and procurement teams were working together, or failing to, that led you to build Omnea?
I came at it from the supplier side. At my last company, Tessian, we sold email security to law firms and investment banks, so I sat on the other side of the buying process. The pattern was the same everywhere. Someone in the business wanted a tool and threw it over the fence to procurement, who threw the contract over the next fence to legal. By the time a lawyer saw it, the business had agreed commercial terms, the supplier knew they had the deal, and the security questionnaire was half-finished in someone’s inbox. Legal was forced to sign off on a decision the business had already made, with none of the context.
Before starting Omnea I did around 300 interviews with legal and procurement leaders, and the same thing kept coming up. Intake, security, privacy, legal and procurement each lived in their own system. Each team could be individually good; the handoffs between them were where the weeks and the risk leaked out. You can’t fix this for procurement alone. It has to work for legal, finance, IT and the person making the request, or it doesn’t work at all.
As AI agents start taking on more autonomous decisions in contracting and supplier risk, what’s the biggest challenge legal teams need to get right to keep control without slowing the business down?
Getting the rules right before anything runs on its own. The instinct in legal is to keep a human in every loop. But when the loop is slow, people go around it, especially at a time when early AI adoption is delivering real competitive advantage. That increases risk and leaves spend under management low, which means millions in missed savings and wasted spend.
The better model is proportional. Legal decides upfront what an agent can handle alone and what needs a human. A vendor touching client data, or using sub-processors nobody has seen before, goes to a lawyer. A renewal of a tool the firm has run for three years with the same usage does not. The system applies those rules at the point of request, before anyone negotiates a contract, and every decision, human or agent, lands in one continuous audit trail. When a client asks how you assessed a vendor, the answer takes minutes rather than days of digging through inboxes.
Where do you see the line between procurement and legal blurring over the next five years, and what will that mean for how legal teams are structured?
The line blurs at the transactional layer first, and that is most of the volume. Reviewing standard paper, scoring a security questionnaire, chasing a renewal: in five years nobody will care whether that was a procurement or a legal task, because a system will do it in the flow of the request, against policies both teams agreed. At that point the question stops being which department owns the work and becomes who owns the rules.
I already see it in firms rebuilding vendor management. The COO, GC, CIO, CISO and head of procurement are around the same table, because all of their perspectives are required to build the right guardrails. The buying decision and the risk decision are now the same decision.
For legal teams, I think that means fewer people doing first-pass review and more senior people setting policy and taking the hard cases. Legal ops and procurement ops converge into one vendor governance function, whatever the org chart calls it. We’re already seeing this in legal with customers like Covington and Penningtons Manches Cooper, and in financial services with T. Rowe Price and PayPal.
