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Ironclad yesterday unveiled a new version of its contract platform embedded with an AI layer in an effort to improve business workflows throughout the contract lifecycle.
According to Jason Boehmig, the company’s CEO and co-founder, automating the contract creation process can help organizations create contracts 60% faster. They will also have the ability to “slice and dice” all operational data in previously executed contracts, he said.
“They have a bunch of contracts that existed before they worked with us,” which are static PDFs, Boehmig told VentureBeat. Ironclad Smart Import uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert PDF files to DOCX when editing The software scans, indexes, tags and stores contract data at scale.The new platform is designed to make contracts full-text searchable, automate data extraction and extract key terms such as renewal dates.
In this way, a company’s customer service team can contact a customer to see if they are going to renew a contract, Boehmig explains. “If you miss that, you lose income. “Utilities, [contracts] … are fully living, breathing documents because of the AI analysis used to tag them and make them searchable.”
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The AI functionality also makes it possible to recognize who needs to approve a contract and automatically route it to them, he said.
The new world of contract creation
Also yesterday, Ironclad launched Ironclad Playbooks in beta, which uses AI-powered clause detection to allow customers to review and negotiate contracts. Playbooks is designed to automatically analyze contracts and highlight areas that require thorough review and offer suggestions on how to negotiate based on legally approved guidelines, the company said.
Contract creation in the “old world looks like a human with a checklist reading contracts line by line and checking boxes and making sure every sentence meets the checklist,” Cai GoGwilt, co-founder and CTO at Ironclad, told VentureBeat. That person would have to negotiate using a redlining process and going back and forth via email or writing things out and scanning, he added. “The new world is accelerating that” using AI to “intelligently negotiate and review contracts at scale.”
The software scans each part of the contract and links it to the organization’s preconfigured playbooks, and keeps track of every line in the playbook in compliance and suggests language that can be redeemed, GoGwilt said. “It’s contextual and allows the user to make better decisions faster.”
“When you’re dealing with supplier contracts of 20 to 30 pages, the manual review process takes a tremendous amount of time, but it’s critical work,” Charles Hurr, associate general counsel at L’Oréal, said in a statement. “Ironclad AI automatically reviews these contracts, flags language and clauses that don’t work for us, and suggests L’Oréal-approved terms to trade in.”
This shortens the review process from hours to minutes, Hurr said, and improves his team’s efficiency, freeing up time for people to focus on more impactful work.
“Our goal is to keep 95% of our contracts legal, and Ironclad’s AI-powered workflows, consent checks and analytics get us there,” Catherine Choe, director of legal affairs at Everlaw, said in a statement. “Ironclad has helped our team facilitate growth by dramatically accelerating contract upload and review while maintaining compliance and mitigating risk.”
AI and analytics
Ironclad said the new AI tools come on the heels of the release of Ironclad Insights, a contract analytics and visualization platform. Because Ironclad automatically captures both metadata and process data, Insights is designed to allow users to create visualizations of critical operational and business data to make faster decisions, identify bottlenecks, and present findings in an understandable way to key stakeholders.
Pricing for the new platform is based on the number of users, Ironclad said.
Earlier this year, Ironclad announced it had raised $150 million in Series E funding from Franklin Templeton, a global investment management firm, bringing total funding to $333 million.
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