How WSP scaled global contract management with AI-powered contract review

WSP Global had already built a contract review system. The problem? Nobody in Legal wanted to use it.

WSP, a global professional services firm with more than 85,000 employees, had originally designed this particular workflow in question with the company's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project team. And, on paper, it seemed to check the right boxes.  

But once WSP's legal team started using the workflow, the gaps were obvious. It didn't match the reality of how the team reviewed contracts on a day-to-day basis, and for a firm of WSP's size, that was a warning sign. A contract system that didn't fit Legal's workflow meant the company's single largest source of business risk was running through a process nobody trusted.

Looking for solutions, the legal team suggested something different:  Implementing an out-of-the-box Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform. The stakes were high enough that leadership gave the project a blunt mandate: “Don't be wrong.”

As Alyse Wilkinson, WSP's Senior Director of Global Legal Operations, recently recounted for the “Contract Heroes” podcast, her team knew they needed workflows designed specifically for Legal, plus a single source of truth spanning direct and indirect procurement and client contracting. It also had to work at a global scale.

That last requirement was key. At the time, WSP had 55,000 employees spread across markets with fundamentally different legal and regulatory requirements, from common law jurisdictions like the UK and Canada to civil law markets across Latin America. Two regions had already cobbled together their own contract intake process, one on Microsoft Power Platform and another on SharePoint, but neither came close to a real CLM system. Wilkinson's team wanted a platform that could eventually put AI to work reviewing contracts, instead of just storing them.

Choosing a CLM platform that could scale globally

The WSP Legal team ran a 12-week Request For Proposals (RFP) process, ultimately selecting Agiloft for its flexibility, configurability, and AI roadmap, which aligned with the company’s longer-term ambitions.  

The team compressed User Acceptance Testing (UAT) into two weeks and still went live in six months, using an OOTB configuration that let each country flag its own legal and regulatory requirements. Adoption was mandatory from day one, with no trial period. Every contract routed through centralized triage immediately, a shift so visible that when WSP's COO visited the region, the team pulled up a live dashboard showing every contract reviewed.  

The implementation began in Latin America: seven countries, three languages, roughly 3,000 employees, and 25 legal team members. The region wasn't yet integrated with WSP's ERP, and its legal function was already mid-restructure, so it was the perfect time to try something new.

With Latin America live, WSP connected its Procurement and client-contracting sides of the business to its ERP, pushing into its three largest markets at once: Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, covering around 55,000 employees in a single push. New Zealand, Australia, and the Middle East followed shortly after, with Sweden the most recent addition.  

How WSP built trust in AI-powered contract redlining

“While we were building the plane and flying it, we decided to start building another plane and flying it,” Wilkinson said.

That second plane was Agiloft Astra, Agiloft’s new contracts AI platform.  

Like any emergent technology, Astra did not win trust simply by being powerful. That hesitation was natural, especially in Legal, where AI adoption is still tempered by concerns about accuracy, reliability and data privacy.  

The Legal team worried an AI tool might inadvertently damage trust with its clients by sending them unrecognizable, fully redlined contracts.  

Astra's approach to AI addressed that fear directly. The platform flags and edits specific clauses instead of rewriting the contract wholesale, leaving everything else untouched. That level of control is what turned skeptics into users. Teams across Italy, Latin America and the Middle East have since adopted Astra with little friction.  

WSP's legal team then ran a 12-week sprint to build clause libraries and negotiation playbooks inside the platform, starting with client contracts.  

Wilkinson calls the result their “client contract Bible,” a system that lets regional teams add localized guidance notes while keeping the underlying risk standards identical company-wide, so a client is reviewed the same way whether the deal is being negotiated in Chile, Canada or the Middle East.

What's next for WSP's contract AI program

With Astra, WSP can now a structured, AI-powered approach to contract review across markets with distinct legal traditions, while maintaining the consistent risk standards its global clients expect.

And the next phase is already taking shape. WSP is exploring new ways to expand Astra’s role across the contract lifecycle, including:

• Reviewing contracts at scale: Applying Astra’s project workspace to review multiple contracts against a shared standard at once.

• Accelerating M&A due diligence: Assessing larger contract sets rather than relying on small, manually reviewed samples.

• Strengthening obligation management: Helping the business automatically track and act on contractual obligations.

• Turning negotiations into insight: Building AI-generated contract summaries that show how closely each negotiation aligned with policy.

Get started with Agiloft Astra

WSP’s journey from a mismatched ERP workflow to a globally standardized contract management program shows what’s possible when responsible contract AI is implemented with the right foundation.  

If your organization is facing similar challenges, Astra can help you get there faster.  

Astra helps Legal, Procurement, and contracting teams review agreements, identify risk, and find answers across their contract portfolios without relying on outside counsel or waiting through a lengthy implementation process.

Ready to get to work? Get started using Astra for free today with no credit card required.  

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