Panasonic Automotive builds the technology inside your car. If you've tapped a touchscreen, changed the climate, or connected your phone on a drive, there's a good chance they built it, across tens of millions of vehicles on the road today.

In North America, a small legal operations and contract management team handles its supplier agreements, technology licensing, and commercial deals.

The work that took three days

Before Spellbook, the team reviewed every contract by hand. Their standard positions and alternative clauses lived in template Word documents on a shared drive, so finding the right language meant scrolling through a file to remember which agreement it came from. Cicely Breckenridge, who joined as legal operations manager when the longtime lead retired, says the same work used to take about three times as long as it does now.

She felt it on her first contract. One agreement took her three days to get through, and she caught a clause the team had missed. But by the time she surfaced it, the business had already steered the client away from what they'd asked about.

"We actually could have had an opportunity to create more business." — Cicely Breckenridge, Panasonic Automotive

Tackling the work they never had time for

When manual work eats away the day, bigger projects keep getting bumped. Spellbook helped turn that around. The team never had a structured way to evaluate and choose its outside law firms, so Cicely built a formal RFP process with Associate, from defining the process and drafting the RFP to setting up the scoring matrix and scoring the proposals as they came back.

"Something that would have taken at best about three weeks, I was able to put together in four days." — Cicely Breckenridge, Panasonic Automotive

Refreshing their outside counsel guidelines was the next project to cross off their list. As one of her first assignments, Cicely gathered guidelines from about 29 other companies and used Associate to pull the best of them together. She redlined Panasonic Automotive's own version in Word and rolled the result out to its law firms. Tied to better invoice auditing, the updated guidelines have meant cost savings and a standard 10% discount, now enforced with firms that previously didn't have one.

Getting answers out of a shared drive

Spellbook reshaped the everyday review, too. The first job was to take the standard language out of their template documents and build it into Playbooks, so the right position was used on every review instead of buried in a file someone had to go look for.

"We have alternative language without having to look and be like, hey, do you remember which agreement we use this clause in?" — Olga Bukowski, Panasonic Automotive

From twenty minutes down to two

Olga Bukowski handles contract management for the whole team, which means routing agreements she didn't write into approvals and signature. A supplier contract can be 20 pages, and someone has to summarize it and flag what changed before it moves. That used to mean reading the whole thing or chasing down whoever wrote it to get that context. Now Spellbook hands Olga a summary with the key terms already pulled, like a change in base rent buried in a lease amendment, and she drops it straight into the contract management system and on to the signatory.

"Instead of a 20-minute thing, it's a two-minute thing, so now I've got some time back to do something else." — Olga Bukowski, Panasonic Automotive

Those summaries go all the way up to the company president for signature. Cicely Breckenridge, the team's legal operations manager, saw what that did for Olga.

"They verbally told our GC that they see the improvement in the summaries coming through for them, specifically calling out Olga for the great job she's doing stepping up in that way. And it actually resulted in a promotion for Olga this year." — Cicely Breckenridge, Panasonic Automotive

A daily right hand

Spellbook has become the team's everyday tool. It summarizes and redlines, answers the questions that used to send people to Google, and translates the Spanish-language proposals and policies coming out of the company's Mexico operations. It also handles comparisons no one could do by hand. Olga recently lined up a 2008 contract against its 2026 version, both PDFs with side-by-side English and Spanish. Associate found the single article that had changed, so the team could focus its review on that one section.

"Spellbook is like my right hand. I mean literally." — Olga Bukowski, Panasonic Automotive

What's next for Panasonic

Panasonic Automotive has just scratched the surface of what they can do with Spellbook. The legal team is rolling it out to nearly everyone who does analytical work and building more playbooks for more contract types, as the company pushes AI deeper into everyday work.

"We have just made sure everybody on the team who does any kind of analytical work will have access." — Cicely Breckenridge, Panasonic Automotive

For a team that once lost three days to a single agreement, the trade is simple. Spellbook does the heavy lifting, and the lawyers get to the work that actually needs a lawyer.

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