Contracts traditionally require a bunch of laborious paper pushing and keen attention to detail. Enforcing agreements has remained a highly manual process, with lengthy playbooks to inform every type of contract. Software has emerged over time to fill the gap, but many solutions remain surprisingly brittle, requiring months of technical and legal work just to enforce minor changes.
With $84 million in funding and clients like Strava, Convoy and Namely, SF-based Ironclad is one of the larger players pushing innovation in the contracts space. The company says its technology is an antidote to stuffy contract management software, offering a no-code workflow automation platform where users can generate, tag and build conditionality into contractual workflows. Values and tags — say, a given dollar amount — can trigger approval requirements from different staff, and users designate who should sign where, and when.
Ironclad has also built analytics into its platform, allowing legal teams to identify contractual features that might cause hesitation or bottlenecks so teams can build future agreements to counteract those delays. It’s all part of a strategy the company says will turn legal teams into productive partners in business operations, rather than the folks typically known for pumping the brakes.
Co-founder and CTO Cai GoGwilt outlined how the company’s engineering team is leveraging digital technology to help those legal teams find new value in contracts.
Describe the technical work that goes into building a product capable of extracting structured metadata from traditional contract paperwork. What was your team’s biggest challenge to date?
One of our biggest challenges to date has been building Workflow Designer, a tool that empowers legal teams and contract managers to fully control contract language and policy. Crafting an intuitive interface that gives people the power necessary to control a collaborative process like contracting is incredibly difficult. In our experience, these tools often end up missing the mark, usually because they are too complicated for anyone without a depth of programming experience, and sometimes because they don’t give the user enough power. Our team continues to work cross-functionally across engineering, product design and product management — as well as with customer success and our users — to iterate and find the right balance of user experience and function.
The pace of business is accelerating, and the pace of contracting needs to accelerate to match it.”
Was your team able to rely on any open-source projects to get you started?
We work heavily with open source projects in the Node, TypeScript and React ecosystems. For our infrastructure, we leverage systems like Kubernetes — Minikube and Telepresence for development have been amazing. Our setup was different when we started, but by shifting our mentality to invest a percentage of our effort into our own velocity, we’ve been able to choose modern technologies from the open-source community that have accelerated our development pace.
Are there any technological trends in the space that you feel are overhyped? What do you need to pay attention to, and what can you ignore?
I think AI is so misunderstood in this space that it is effectively a red herring. I think there is a lot of promise in AI around contracting and legal tech, but also so much hype that it is causing confusion.
I think conversations around the future of work are deeply related to this as well. We should be paying attention to the future of contracting, the future of the in-house legal team and the future of the legal profession. However, even here, there are red herrings. The legal profession is not going away — it is adapting. But it will change a lot.
Has this technology opened any new opportunities in contracting or legal technology that were not possible before?
The pace of business is accelerating, and the pace of contracting needs to accelerate to match it. Over the past 10 or 15 years, contracting tech has focused on trying to keep up. Now, with new tools, in-house legal teams are completely changing how they work.
One of the most exciting things about working on Ironclad is evolving our platform as our users change the way they work. You might think product development consists of understanding users’ problems and then developing and iterating on a solution to address those problems. However, for us, the fact that our users have our solution enables them to strive to solve the next problem, which means the nature of their problems shift as they rely more and more on the platform. This is an incredibly tricky, but also incredibly fun problem to solve.
