See how the world's top legal innovators automate their contracts

We couldn’t mention the highlights of State of Digital Contracting Summer without giving a shoutout to Ironclad’s General Counsel and emcee, Chris Young, and giving you a link to our Spotify event playlist by DJ Thad (You’re going to want to save this one!).

Mary O’Carroll: Community keynote

Community announcements

• We’re excited to announce our new focus on community at Ironclad. You are going to see some great new features and tools, all aimed at helping you and our other customers, users, and experts, to share and contribute to each others’ success. You will no longer have to go it alone. You can learn from the world’s best contracting professionals.
• Mary’s role is to help organize and nurture the incredible group of people around Ironclad into the world’s foremost gathering of digital contracting expertise. Her vision is  to create something special together, a supportive and positive community. A place where we are connected.
• This all starts with a new online forum: A welcoming, inspiring place for professionals to meet, learn, and share. If we’ve learned anything from the past year and a quarter, it’s how important it is to be able to find people and get information online. When it comes to getting resources, finding new templates, or finding a new contact, this is going to be your place.
• It will also include special events for our customers and friends. Some of these will be virtual, some physical, but all will be designed with your needs in mind. Whether you are a black belt contracting expert or just getting started in the field, you’ll find an event that is useful to you.
• Finally, the Ironclad Community will be launching new groups. The ability to join others who share a similar challenge, or are active in the same region as you, is so important to building your skill set and your network, and we’re excited to provide opportunities for connection and leadership.

How Branch’s Legal Operations Manager builds user-friendly MSAs in Workflow Designer

• Branch is a global company currently experiencing hyper growth, and because of that, they are building their contract workflows with standardization in mind.
• With a focus on ease-of-use, they decided to offer their sales reps an easy path to creating a contract. Using simple language, they asked easy-to-answer questions that were straightforward about their team, effective dates, additional reviewers, and the customer account. Keep it simple: tell me about your team, effective date, additional reviewers needed.
• The goal is to standardize this contract, meaning they already have approved language for something like governing law and can edit it according to state or country. Then, they have conditions set up based on the chosen location for governing law, and can preview the entire contract before sending it.

How Bitmovin’s General Counsel uses Ironclad to power the world’s first universal NDA

• The universal NDA comprises 13 standardized clauses, either conditions or variables and it allows us to create up to 192 different versions of the same contract, for any use case we might encounter.
• It includes two forms: A launch form with a series of multiple choice questions that guide business users through the process of creating their own contract, and a counterparty form that collects information from the other side and allows them to negotiate against the contract without involving lawyers. After both forms have been completed (And any questions have been answered by referencing the open-source repository), they are sent out for signature. And there you have it: A customizable, universal NDA that empowers your users and gives back time to your legal team.

How Kriya Therapeutics’ Sr. Director of Corporate Legal and Compliance manages the relationship between SOWs and MSAs

• Kriya Therapeutics is a biotech company that works with many different suppliers, which means they need their contract process to be very organized. They wanted to achieve enforceability, visibility, and consistency in the contract process, as well as in how they manage them.
• They quickly understood the Importance of tagging in Ironclad to collect metadata, but went through a few iterations of tags to maximize the user experience within their SOWs. Through Ironclad, they were also able to capture the relationships between SOWs and MSAs, as well as preserve the contract hierarchy.
• Then, the Kriya team used Project Codes to label and correctly identify contracts, and they worked cross functionally to create an iteration that worked across teams.

Ironclad’s own Sr. Manager of Finance and Strategy demonstrates our procurement and budgeting workflow

• Last year, when COVID-19 hit, Ironclad, like many businesses, had to make many new considerations in the face of uncertainty. We suddenly really needed to focus on our payment obligations for all of the cash going out of the business. In response, our finance and legal ops teams built a procurement workflow in Ironclad that could identify payment obligations for contracts that were in-flight before they were even signed.
• First, they focused on simplicity, using simple language any business user could understand.
• Next, they focused on visibility: By adding questions about term length, payment amount, and other details, our entire team suddenly had visibility into every contract. No more manual transfers from Excel sheets!
• Another important factor was ownership and approval: They built the ability to choose departments, teams, and approvers into this workflow so no contract will make its way to execution unless it’s approved by all necessary parties.
• This workflow didn’t just help our team weather COVID-19—It also continues to help us plan for the future and how we invest in the business. It allows us to ensure we have the right level of approvals, control, and visibility needed to drive us toward Ironclad’s strategic vision.

• One of Sarepta’s main problems-to-solve was managing their HR contracts. There wasn’t a good process or system for submitting HR contracts for legal review and ensuring HR and the hiring manager were in the loop.
• Thankfully, Sarepta was able to solve this problem using Workflow Designer. First, they used the questions within launch forms to not only collect important metadata, but to also validate something that was previously an assumption, such as a background check. They also used questions to inform the stakeholder and set expectations about the process.
• After learning that 70% of their contracts were being signed by executives, Sarepta added a question to the launch form that asks which executive is responsible for the contingent worker, this tied into the sign step by making the responsible executive the signatory, which greatly streamlined the process and creates foundation for good reporting
• By adding HR as approvers, HR is able to track the contracts in real time, maximizing cross-functional collaboration

• Last year, when COVID-19 hit, Ironclad, like many businesses, had to make many new considerations in the face of uncertainty. We suddenly really needed to focus on our payment obligations for all of the cash going out of the business. In response, our finance and legal ops teams built a procurement workflow in Ironclad that could identify payment obligations for contracts that were in-flight before they were even signed.
• First, they focused on simplicity, using simple language any business user could understand.
• Next, they focused on visibility: By adding questions about term length, payment amount, and other details, our entire team suddenly had visibility into every contract. No more manual transfers from Excel sheets!
• Another important factor was ownership and approval: They built the ability to choose departments, teams, and approvers into this workflow so no contract will make its way to execution unless it’s approved by all necessary parties.
• This workflow didn’t just help our team weather COVID-19—It also continues to help us plan for the future and how we invest in the business. It allows us to ensure we have the right level of approvals, control, and visibility needed to drive us toward Ironclad’s strategic vision.