Jurist enables me to do my job more independently. I know our product really well, but I’m not an attorney. This is helping me achieve my tasks a lot faster, requesting legal input only when needed, which frees up legal’s time for more complicated matters.
Signifyd makes it a point to have the right tools to ensure it can respond to customers’ needs immediately. Its Commerce Protection Platform protects online merchants from payment fraud and consumer abuse through big data and machine learning that sorts fraudulent online orders from legitimate ones. “Good enough” isn’t an option for Signifyd and their customers—their decisions must be best in class.
That philosophy exists throughout the organization, where Signifyd’s legal team is always looking for ways to improve.
The results were swift when Signifyd’s Legal team, in a project led by their Contracts Manager and Ironclad Architect Zuhair Saadat, first implemented Ironclad’s CLM. Signifyd processed nearly 200 agreements within 7 days leading up to month-end.
The team is constantly refining its contracting process, so when the opportunity to join a beta program for Ironclad’s AI Assistant arose, they jumped at it.
In just a few months of beta testing, Zuhair; Signifyd’s Head of Commercial Legal, Cory Sumsion; and the rest of the legal team have saved compounding time and effort while focusing on the highest-impact tasks.
Global growth presents new contracting challenges
As Signfiyd’s customer base grew and deals became more involved, the contracting process reached new levels of complexity. Tasks that would be simpler at a smaller organization, like reviewing a few contracts for uniquely negotiated clauses, become time-prohibitive for a company the size of Signifyd.
I was getting time-sensitive and time-intensive requests across the business that were taking me ages. By ages, I mean it was hours and hours.
For example, one request had Zuhair checking on specific scenarios, like “What were all the variations of a specific clause that we negotiated in the past six months?” Zuhair was happy to investigate, but with 5,000 agreements to comb through, a simple task could eat up a day or longer. The more time a single project takes, the more everything else gets pushed back. That has a high impact on legal and the teams they support.
Signifyd recognizes the need to adapt and adopt AI
Ironclad’s 2024 State of AI in Legal Report surveyed 800 American legal professionals evenly split between law firms and in-house roles. After reading the report, something stood out to Zuhair—more in-house legal teams are using AI each day.
90% of legal professionals who used AI tools in 2023 expected to use them more frequently in 2024, and 71% of respondents’ organizations plan to invest in enterprise AI tools this year. Overall, in-house teams are more likely to use and invest in AI tools than law firms.
With the industry constantly evolving, Signifyd knew they needed to continue to invest in technology or prepare to fall behind.
I feel like if we're not going to use AI within Legal at some point, we're going to be behind our legal peers.
So, the team was ready when we approached them about the opportunity to take part in a beta test for Ironclad Jurist. The tools would enable the team to review, draft, and research faster while freeing up time to focus on the most impactful decisions.
The way I saw it is if we can use AI to arm our team to do our jobs faster without needing to engage legal, who's working on critical and strategic deals, that's a net benefit to Signifyd overall.
5 ways Signifyd has used Ironclad Jurist (so far)
Zuhair and the Signifyd legal team got right to work putting Ironclad Jurist to the test and finding creative ways to use it. They found there were so many use cases, that Zuhair tracks everything they’ve used AI for in a dedicated document. Legal is able to respond more quickly to internal teams, like Sales, with AI assistance.
Analyze foreign language contracts
Signifyd’s global customer base means that some contracts come across Zuhair’s desk in a language he can’t read. “Just today, I actually archived an agreement that was pretty much written entirely in a foreign language,” Zuhair noted.
He wanted to know when the agreement expired, so he asked Ironclad Jurist to extract that information for him. Zuhair was suspicious when the tool told him that the vendor agreement wouldn’t expire. So, he dug deeper.
I pushed Jurist and asked it to confirm where the agreement says it doesn't expire, and it pointed me to that clause—even though it was written in a foreign language.
Within minutes—and without trying to translate a confidential document manually—Zuhair found a document that needed further review.
Compare documents in simple terms
When you need a quick refresh or summary, reading through multiple documents can take up a lot of time. So, Cory uses Ironclad Jurist to extract critical points within documents. Having a quick reference between documents makes it faster to find discrepancies between versions, track trends in risk, or find outdated clauses when regulations change.
I've used it to provide contract comparisons between multiple clauses and full contracts—putting it in plain language to summarize what the difference is between each? This is a giant step forward from just spitting out redlines to compare manually.
Save days of work on drafting bespoke agreements
When Signifyd’s contract templates don’t fit a scenario, the legal team must create a custom document. AI saves time during drafting so Cory and his team can focus on fine-tuning the critical details.
Rather than having to go out and find a bunch of different templates to cut and paste and reword, I can ask Ironclad AI to help draft an initial document. I use that as the baseline to draft a new agreement nearly from scratch in a few minutes rather than hours or even days.
Review counterparty agreements in minutes
The volume of vendor agreements that the Signifyd team has to review and manage means they need a way to prioritize their attention. So, they use Ironclad Jurist to flag the clauses they care most about.
When we get third-party NDAs, there are certain clauses that we want to identify. Rather than reading a third-party NDA from top to bottom, we’ll use AI to highlight the risks that we care about. If they're there, we'll quickly make those changes. And if not, then we'll approve it and get it done, usually within minutes.
Create summaries for non-legal stakeholders
The legal team isn’t the only group benefitting from Ironclad Jurist. Document summaries and cover letters help non-legal stakeholders get up to speed on changes and understand the process.
We understand our customers’ legal teams have a high volume of contracts to review and may not be familiar with our SaaS product. To improve clarity, we asked Jurist to create a draft cover letter describing our services. After an internal review with the team, the results are that we can now provide a document for our sales team to share with our customers to provide more context about our services and industry-specific terms before they start redlining.
The AI-assisted summaries also come in handy during negotiations, where important details can easily get lost in lengthy documents.
If an order form goes through multiple iterations and we have an enterprise customer, that order form is very complicated. So, we use AI to summarize what changed in the version of the order form. Because on the other end, it might not always be an attorney reading it, and they see a block of text they may not fully understand, but the plain English summary lets them know what we added and why.
What’s next
Using Ironclad Jurist has led to compounding time savings and impact for the Signifyd team. The mental load of finishing a task isn’t contained to how long it takes to do it, but also the time you spend finding space in your workday for it and collaborating with extra stakeholders to get it done. The impact amplifies to create more time and space for high-priority projects.
Sometimes it's not just the time to do the manual review, but finding the time may take a day or two to get to it. Being able to run it through AI and get results in a few minutes means you may not need to block your calendar to do it later.
Signifyd’s first foray into AI for contract management has been fruitful, but Zuhair recognizes that everyone may not immediately accept AI tools. He still confirms the AI outputs and believes that trust comes from actually using the tools.
I think building trust, at this time, just comes with experience and repetition. It's probably not something I can say, hey, trust me, it works. But I imagine the more we give it, the smarter it will get.
Moving forward, Zuhair is excited to use Jurist to complement everything he already knows about the Signifyd product and its contracts.
To learn how you can use Ironclad Jurist to free up your time for more strategic work, request a 7-day free trial today.
