We saw a huge shift - the majority of NDAs moved to using our template with no review needed. It reduced time spent by 90% for the sales cycle.
For corporate legal departments, administrative drudgery often bogs down substantive work. Gal Bruck, an in-house lawyer with decades of experience spanning both in-house and firm roles under her belt, found a way to streamline mundane tasks and make time for true, strategic legal work.
When Bruck joined demo experience platform Demostack in 2021 as a consultant, she faced an avalanche of agreements awaiting review and approval. As the lone lawyer, she was overwhelmed with ad hoc requests from all corners of the 100-person business. Vital documents like sales contracts and employment paperwork flowed haphazardly between teams with no standard processes.
It was the wild west - everything was just outside agreements that people wanted signed immediately with no organization. I understood the drive to move quickly, but I also knew the risks down the road.
Rather than capitulate to chaos, Bruck sought to inject rigor through innovative legal technology. Her solution: dive deeper into Ironclad, an AI-powered contract lifecycle management platform that Demostack had bought just before Bruck joined. Demostack’s VP of Finance at the time, Dave Wieseneck was an easy sell to get buy-in to start actively rolling it out, having recognized and leveraged its transformative impact at a previous company.
Wieseneck, who oversaw the legal and finance functions, had experienced the same contracting disarray as Bruck in the past, and he knew that maintaining an ad hoc, reactive approach to contract management would hinder Demostack as it scaled. As he put it: “Every system gives you the exact output it was designed to give.”
At its core, a business is just the sum of its contracts. Having an organized repository with direct access to that data is essential for functions like finance to get a complete picture of what's going on. If that's scattered across laptops and emails, you can never be fully prepared when you need to act nimbly.
Embracing an intuitive system
To redesign their contracting process, both Bruck & Wieseneck embraced Ironclad’s modular, no-code UI. A core tenet of his management philosophy is eschewing “carrot and stick” approaches in favor of intuitive systems.
I believe in designing processes where the shortest path between two points is the most efficient way to get the job done. Eliminate any roadblocks so people can naturally gravitate to the optimal workflow without needing incentives or punishments.
Bruck put that into practice by starting with the company’s oft-used NDAs. She uploaded a standard template, allowing parties to self-serve and auto-generate routine contracts without legal’s involvement, something that Ironclad’s Workflow Designer made very easy to both learn and train others on.
“We saw a huge shift – the majority of NDAs moved to using our template with no review needed,” Bruck said. “It reduced time spent by 90% for the sales cycle.”
After ensuring that sales was covered with the new NDA flows, plus sales contracts, amendments and renewals, Bruck applied the same principles to other agreement types, including:
- Quick launch procurement forms to provide context for approving stakeholders, loop in the right stakeholders based on form responses, and ensure transparency when purchasing 3rd party services
- Independent contractor agreement templates based on type and duration of services
- Modular employment agreements and termination documents based on employee location
For many of them, she leveraged Ironclad’s conditional logic to automate variability, like the insertion of region-specific clauses based on user inputs. This allowed business units to self-serve pre-approved terms without endless back-and-forth with legal.
Ironclad allowed legal to be more of a strategic partner by reducing low-value busywork. You can take a step back and see the bigger picture.
Future-proofing scalable operations
For the one-woman team, Ironclad helped streamline operations without adding headcount. Routine contracting accelerated, and higher-value advisory work took precedence over administrative tasks. The impact proved so transformative that Bruck has been fully converted into an evangelist.
I don't think I'll work for another company without using a system like Ironclad because it fundamentally changes how legal operates. There shouldn't be a fear of technology because it elevates the team to provide substantive expertise.
Wieseneck had wholeheartedly agreed, already familiar with how much heavy lifting Ironclad could do on his behalf. A few months before, for example, Demostack needed to raise another funding round rapidly to get ahead of cooling investor markets, so Wieseneck had quickly exported key reports and contracts from the Ironclad Repository.
The nice thing was that we only had to get our contracts into Ironclad once because going forward, it handled all new ones automatically. So the Ironclad Repository was always up-to-date with a complete picture of our entire contract world.
What would have previously been a heavy lift for finance took just two weeks of diligence. Investors were impressed by how quickly Demostack could comprehensively share details.
If you want to be successful and nimble, you have to be ready to take action at any moment. For that, you'd better have designed an intuitive system that maintains a complete picture of your contract data without busy work.
The Road to Automation
Today, antiquated legal operations are a significant burden to would-be tech disruptors. By centralizing sprawling contract data and automating routine agreements, upstarts like Demostack illustrate how investing in modernizing their legal tech stack can optimize the entire contract lifecycle. For those in legal who want to provide front-line advisory impact rather than paperwork triage, ditching manual processing in favor of automation and, importantly, prioritizing self-service enablement–as Bruck and Wieseneck did–can make all the difference. To hear Wieseneck tell it, “People will gravitate to the system or process that you put in front of them because it’s the best, most efficient way to get something done.” And it’s a transformational shift that both in-house teams and law firms would be wise to emulate.
- Average NDA contracting time to close 34 days to 3 days
- Average sales contracting time to close 18.5 days to 3 days