When The Bottleneck Moves To Legal Review
Every speed-up moves a bottleneck somewhere else. Generation made producing advertising much faster, and in many brand teams the queue has now shifted to legal review: the people who check claims, disclaimers, rights and regulatory language, whose numbers did not grow when output did.
Work that took a day to make can wait a week to be cleared.
Why legal review did not speed up
Because the job is judgement, and judgement does not parallelise easily. A reviewer has to know what the product actually does, what the brand has said before, what the category rules allow and what the Advertising Standards Council of India code treats as misleading. That knowledge sits in a few people, and a tenfold increase in variants lands on the same few people.
Some of the variants are trivial. The reviewer still has to look to know that.
The cost of a claim did not fall when the cost of writing it did.
What teams are trying
Pre-cleared language. A library of approved claims, disclaimers and phrasings that writers and tools are required to draw from, so that review becomes a check that the approved words were used rather than a fresh reading of every line.
Tiered review, so that a colour change on a cleared asset moves faster than a new claim. And getting reviewers into the brief, which is cheaper than getting them into the fortieth revision.
What it means for the work
A quieter pressure towards safer copy. When anything novel adds days, novelty starts to look expensive, and work drifts towards what has been cleared before.
That is a creative cost nobody budgets for. The brands that staff review properly will find they can afford to say something new. The rest will find their fast pipeline produces familiar work, slowly.
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