5 min. read
An interview with Joanna Rytwińska, Senior Legal Operations Specialist at OLX, on why the legal team stopped waiting for engineers and started building their own tools.
Joanna, before you started building AI tools — what did day-to-day work in the legal team actually look like?
A lot of our processes relied on manual human work. Collecting signatures, archiving documents, creating reports and analysing contracts were all time-consuming and often tedious. One moment captured that reality better than any description: during the pandemic, our team had to collect signatures from the board of directors by driving to their homes in person. Dozens of kilometres, face masks, gloves, safe distancing, disinfection, with documents handed over at the door.
Today, that story sounds like it belongs to a different era. Although that situation only lasted during the pandemic, it made one thing clear: there had to be a better way to keep operations running.
Where did the idea come from — that lawyers should build their own tools, rather than hand the work to an engineering team?
Given the nature of our work, we know better what our internal clients actually need and which workflows would be most convenient to them. No external technical team understands those nuances as well as we do. Working with internal resources also allowed us to launch new ideas more easily and faster than relying on external support alone.
I’ll be honest: I was sceptical at first. When you’ve spent a large part of your life thinking of yourself as someone more drawn to the humanities than to technology, applying tech to everyday processes can feel complicated, or simply unnecessary.
But it’s not as daunting as it sounds. After the first attempts, and some surprisingly quick successes, I knew I didn’t want to go back to the way things were. Once you see how much time and space you can gain by automating repetitive processes… why would you ever go back?
I have to mention that none of this would have been possible without the incredible support of OLX’s Center of Excellence team. They provided us with technical support, ran workshops, offered ongoing consultations, and incorporated our ideas into their sprints. Without them, this would have been much harder.
One of your team’s latest organisation-wide initiatives, Contracts Companion, reduced NDA preparation time from several days to a few hours. What was the moment you realised it actually worked?
At first, I was a little worried. Were we being too ambitious? NDAs aren’t usually the most complex documents, but some level of review had always been necessary.
That changed when I saw the first results from the test requests; I knew we were witnessing a small revolution.
I still remember the excitement when I looked at the first statistics a month after launching Contracts Companion. Processing time dropped from days to hours, sometimes even minutes. Something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Then the positive feedback started coming in from people submitting requests. That’s when we knew we weren’t going to stop there.
Not long after the Contracts Companion, your team introduced the organisation to Lexi (now Iris) — the legal chatbot on Slack. It runs on your own knowledge, not data from the internet. What was the hardest part of building it?
Surprisingly, the technical side wasn’t the hardest part (that’s where the CoE team deserves enormous credit).
The real challenge was gathering the knowledge and expertise we had built up over years scattered across Jira, Confluence, Google Drive, and sometimes even local drives. Our team covers an enormous range of topics from contracts and product solutions to IP and privacy, across every market and segment. Organising, updating and securing all of that data took serious effort. We then had to find the best way to update the knowledge base without disrupting how Lexi works, so we could keep improving as the company grows and evolves.
The result was worth it. We now have a genuine “second brain” — the most reliable and contextually accurate source of legal knowledge we’ve ever had, built entirely on what we already knew.
Also worth noting: Lexi has since grown and expanded her knowledge and available features – now she’s called Iris! You can find her on Slack – don’t hesitate and give her a try! She’s already helped many colleagues solve questions and problems within minutes. She’s fully trained on our internal knowledge and happy to help with contracting guidance, product-related matters, privacy, and much more.
Contracts Companion and Iris weren’t the only AI-related initiatives in the team. Your team also ran a hackathon where lawyers built their own AI tools. What surprised you most about what the team created?
Everything, honestly! I was surprised by how many people got involved and by the creativity of the ideas. But what surprised me most was that most submissions were already fully working prototypes by the time they were presented. We’re still using and developing them today.
We didn’t just identify problems; we built real solutions. What looked like a major challenge turned out to be a success because we tackled it together. And we didn’t stop there. A second hackathon followed, where we developed the ideas further with a focus on customer value. We are here to support people across the organisation, and we want to do that quickly and efficiently. That’s why the second hackathon centered on design thinking, which helped us come up with even more impressive ideas.
Our team has passed bar exams and holds legal qualifications, so there’s nothing they can’t learn when they set their minds to it 😄
What did OLX do — or not do — that made all of this possible?
The support from the Center of Excellence team was fundamental, both for building specific tools and for building knowledge. Through workshops, ongoing consultations, and integrating our ideas into their sprint cycles, we felt we could genuinely change our reality, with the best specialists behind us. With that kind of backing, what more could you ask for?
What would you say to someone in a legal team at another company who wants to start a similar journey?
Don’t be afraid to take the first step, or to try and fail. Every attempt can become a win or a valuable lesson that only makes you stronger.
Believe me, once you try it – it’s not as difficult as it seems. Take that first step, and you may be surprised by what you can build. Just go with the flow!
Joanna’s story is part of our “AI Innovators” series. Across OLX, people are finding new ways to use AI — to create, simplify, learn, and move faster. This series celebrates the colleagues who are sharing their discoveries and inspiring others to experiment along the way.
