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In construction, risk flows downhill. Owners push it to the prime contractor, primes push it to their subs, and any clause that gets missed along the way becomes a cost someone has to absorb.
As both Chief Financial Officer and Chief Legal Officer, Douglas Arabie carries two executive roles that most companies split between separate leaders. On top of finance and legal, HR and insurance also report to him, and his responsibilities span all seven operating companies and more than 460 employees. Douglas compares the job to triage in an ER, where every issue has to be diagnosed and passed to the right person with the risk under control. With that much landing on one desk, his biggest worry was letting something slip.
Contract review made that harder. Most agreements that came across his desk were master service agreements (MSAs) running 60 to 100 pages, written to pass as much of the owner's or prime contractor's risk as possible down to Onshore. Onshore aimed to pass an equal share of that risk to its own subcontractors, so every upstream contract had to be read alongside the subcontract. Even with a specialist or outside counsel handling the detailed review, Douglas still needed to read the full document to discuss it with confidence. Each agreement cost him hours, and with every contract waiting on his read, he had become a bottleneck.
Douglas discovered LegalOn while researching AI tools that would help him quickly get up to speed on contracts without giving up the confidence that came from reading every page. A full software suite built for law firms was more than he needed; he wanted a focused in-house tool that fit into his existing workflow of redlining in Microsoft Word. LegalOn's Word integration made that decision easy.
Today, contract review starts with a detailed prompt that Douglas saved in LegalOn's Prompt Library. The prompt spells out the specific risks he aims to mitigate and includes Onshore's subcontract language, so the LegalOn Assistant can check the agreement against Onshore's standard terms in a single pass, reducing a task that once required hours to just five to ten minutes.
Douglas’s prompts instruct LegalOn’s AI Assistant to cite its sources. Each item in the summary points back to the section it came from, allowing him to jump directly to the relevant clause for verification rather than scanning 60+ pages or relying on keyword searches. That traceability is what gives him complete confidence in LegalOn’s analysis and lets him trust the output.
Operating directly inside Word, LegalOn streamlines his redlining and drafting workflow. He can turn a one-sided indemnity into a mutual one with a click, and he no longer has to dig through old drafts for clause language he has already approved.
Douglas set up LegalOn as Onshore's single source of truth for contract templates. Approved templates now live in LegalOn, so the team can pull the most current version and know it's ready to deploy. With a dependable starting point for every agreement, Douglas can focus on getting documents in front of the right reviewers while Onshore's contracts and claims specialist tracks each one through final signature.
Since adopting LegalOn, Onshore has seen measurable gains:
"Before, I was reading contracts that were 60 pages long to be able to talk intelligently with outside counsel about them. Now I have a detailed prompt built out for exactly the risk I'm trying to mitigate, with our subcontract built into it. Within five or ten minutes, I know whether our subcontract language is going to work." — Douglas Arabie, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Legal Officer, Onshore Companies
Before LegalOn, every contract demanded Douglas's full review before it could move forward, and his day belonged to whichever contract was next in line. Today, a first-pass review takes mere minutes, allowing him to concentrate on steering work and addressing high-level strategic choices.
This transformation shifted his technical requirements. Initially, the priority centered on reviewing 100-page agreements while preserving complete accuracy. Now, his focus spans tracking exposure across all seven operating entities without opening individual files. As his responsibilities have grown, LegalOn’s Assistant and central templates have evolved alongside his needs. “I probably would have outgrown LegalOn if it hadn't grown with me,” Douglas notes.
Onshore is going after bigger projects, and bigger projects bring bigger contracts and more risk flowing down from owners and primes. Douglas wants his team ready for that volume, with their time going to judgment calls rather than tracking down terms.
Next, he plans to use LegalOn to pull key terms out of each agreement, so he can compare them across Onshore's contracts at a glance instead of opening them one by one. As the work grows, his team's attention stays on the risk decisions that need them.
Ready to do more with the team you have? Book a demo to see how LegalOn helps in-house teams work faster without adding headcount.
