At the 2026 Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards and Dinner, Tonkean took home *two* major awards—best “Legal Operations Innovation” and best “Innovations in Contracts Technology.”
After the dinner, Tonkean’s General Manager of LegalWorks, Aaron Bromagem, sat down with the team at Law.com to detail the importance for modern day legal ops teams of technologies like Tonkean. And, more specifically, why orchestration has become the defining capability for legal teams operating at scale.
Here’s the interview, reproduced in full.
For years, legal operations teams have equated progress with speed. Faster contract review. Faster routing. Faster answers. Artificial intelligence has only intensified that instinct. But as AI begins to move work automatically across systems, something uncomfortable is becoming clear: speed does not compensate for structural weakness. It exposes it.
Aaron Bromagem, a senior legal operations executive with Tonkean, detailed that the distinction that mattered most was not between old tools and new ones, but between two fundamentally different ways of thinking about legal work: automation and orchestration.
Automation, Bromagem explained, assumes the work is already understood. The steps are known, ownership is clear and efficiency comes from acceleration.
Orchestration, among other things, bridges the parts of legal work that have always been implicit rather than designed—decision rights, conditional logic, accountability, escalation and proof. Those gaps could be glossed over when humans quietly absorbed ambiguity. It cannot be ignored once machines take over the movement of work.
“Automation assumes you’ve already figured everything out,” Bromagem said. “Orchestration is different. It’s tackling the questions that were always kind of fuzzy.”
Those fuzzy areas have long been managed informally. When a handoff broke, someone noticed. When a decision wasn’t clearly owned, experience filled the gap. If AI manages work, we need new means of doing that.
As Bromagem put it, “It’s not about how much smarter it is than us—it’s how much faster it makes things.” Speed turns small ambiguities into systemic risk.
That is why Bromagem views many legal operations failures not as workflow breakdowns, but as governance failures.
“Most failures in legal ops aren’t because they forgot a step,” he said. “They’re because decision rights are unclear.”
Automation simply accelerates whatever logic already exists. If ownership, escalation and success criteria were never explicit, they do not disappear when AI is introduced. They scale.
The warning signs of that fragility are often visible well before a crisis. Bromagem described organizations that still rely on spreadsheets and institutional memory to manage critical obligations.
“You could always tell when a company’s six months away from a disaster,” he noted, “because their process is basically, ‘Sarah will remember.’”
That approach holds until growth, turnover or an acquisition forces the organization to confront how much of its operation lived only in people’s heads. Orchestration replaces memory with design. Nowhere is this distinction more consequential than in how legal teams treat contracts. Most organizations still view contracts as static documents—signed, filed and revisited only when something goes wrong. Bromagem rejects that framing outright.
“It doesn’t really matter where your contracts are,” he said. “It matters what’s in them.” Pricing terms, SLAs, renewal dates, audit rights, notice periods—these are not archival details. They are operational commitments.
That is why he flips the traditional contract lifecycle on its head. In many systems, signature marks the end of legal’s involvement. From Bromagem’s perspective, that logic is backwards.
“The signature is the starting gun—not the end point.” Execution is the moment obligations come alive and exposure begins. Without orchestration—clear ownership, triggers, timelines and auditability—those obligations remain theoretical until something breaks.
The same misunderstanding is playing out in today’s rush toward AI governance. Organizations are scrambling to write policies after tools are already in use, assuming governance can be layered on later. Bromagem was blunt about the limits of that approach. “People think if you have a policy document, you’ve solved the problem.”
Policies articulate intent, but they do not enforce behavior. “That’s not a policy—that’s a system.” Orchestration is what turns governance into something demonstrable—rules that constrain action, escalation paths that involve humans and audit trails that show what happened and why.
The early value of orchestration is not always framed as traditional ROI, but it is no less real. Missed SLA credits. Unclaimed contractual rights. Obligations that exist on paper but are never enforced because no one owns them operationally. Automation speeds tasks. Orchestration ensures those tasks reach the right person, under the right conditions, with accountability attached.
The deeper implication Bromagem returned to is one legal teams can no longer postpone. Informal process was survivable when humans served as the backstop. AI removes that safety net. Orchestration forces organizations to decide—explicitly—how work should flow, who owns decisions and what success looks like before speed magnifies every weakness.
In that sense orchestration is not a buzzword or a feature set. It is the dividing line between legal teams that can operate safely at scale and those that will discover, very quickly, that automation without orchestration is simply faster failure.
Want to learn more about what orchestration can do for your legal ops team? Start here.
