Highlights From State of Digital Contracting Fall

Couldn’t attend State of Digital Contracting Fall live? We’ve got you covered with everything you missed, from the clickwrap keynote and Ironclad product announcements to stories from our customers DoorDash and Snap Inc.

We can’t mention State of Digital Contracting Fall without shoutouts to Ironclad’s General Counsel and emcee, Chris Young (and his sick Crocs!), @legaltechbro, Alex Su, and our very own DJ Thad and the Spotify event playlist we’ve had on repeat all day. 🎵

Dive deeper into the individual speaker sessions below:

• Ironclad Clickwrap takes all online agreements, wherever they might live, and applies digital contracting principles to make them easier to manage, more dynamic, and more enforceable than any other clickwrap contract no matter the transaction volume.
• It’s made for legal teams who need to manage all of their online agreements all in one place. It’s also made for technical teams who need to embed those agreements in multiple digital experiences. Ironclad Clickwrap connects the two in a single system that shows the right agreement to the right user at the right time.
• Ironclad Clickwrap captures the evidence: the who, where, when, what, and how of every accepted contract. It also captures a snapshot of the screen your user was looking at the moment of acceptance, for absolute enforceability.

Try Ironclad Clickwrap for yourself with an instant demo → 

• Although it may look like the Terms of Service are still on the company website, they’re actually hosted by Ironclad Clickwrap. This means the legal team doesn’t need to file JIRA tickets with engineering to update the terms—they can make any changes in the platform themselves. 
• In the Ironclad Clickwrap platform, you’ll find every past version of the terms, making it easy to change and deploy changes over time. 
• Ironclad Clickwrap also keeps a record of every transaction, including all the data you need to support a case, like the user’s IP address, timestamp, and device details. It also grabs a snapshot of the screen they saw right at the moment of acceptance.

Get control over every version of your online terms → 

• Typical B2B contracting approaches weren’t working for DoorDash because of the pure volume of agreements they handle that require attention from both the sales and legal teams. They also needed a unique solution that wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach and could cater to the many types of precise agreements they would need. 
• DoorDash created a process where sales reps can send a clickwrap contract to merchants as part of their workflow. The experience is low touch and fully compliant.
• Simultaneously, they’ve also launched a totally self-service merchant experience for small businesses. Here’s how it works: Ironclad Clickwrap generates the right agreement for them to accept, right on the spot, based on the info they fill out on the DoorDash website. Technically, they have hundreds and hundreds of versions of contracts in all of their various configurations, but their legal team doesn’t have to worry about manually selecting which contract to display—the tool does the work of showing the right one at the right time.

Learn how to embed legally enforceable contracts into every transaction point → 

• The tension between risk and speed is the story of business contracts everywhere, and no matter how good your team or technology is, there’s one thing we can’t speed up: the counterparty. 
• With Ironclad Clickwrap and CLM under one roof, we’re able to apply technology from one to the other, and it’s going to change how you think about getting your contracts accepted:

Introducing self-service for your counterparties in 3 easy steps:

1. Launch: Enable counterparties to initiate the contract process on their own with Public Workflows. It’s a single URL that you can share anywhere—in your emails, website, or product.
2. Negotiation: Allow counterparties to tell you what terms they will accept within the parameters you define, all before the document is even generated with counterparty forms
3. Acceptance: Choose the mode of acceptance (e-sign or clickwrap) strategically based on what works best for the contract and the counterparty. Use clickwrap when you want to reduce negotiation. Since it’s all built into Ironclad CLM, you can fall back to your standard negotiation flow at any time, without missing a beat.

Learn how public workflows reduce negotiation and create better customer experiences →

• The Creative Services Agreement is pretty unique to Snapchat. It’s like an internal creative agency, which develops and reformats video ads as well as filters and augmented reality Lenses to advertisers. Since Snap was one of the first platforms to use 100% vertical video, they needed an easy way for advertisers to adopt this new format.
• A single ad account could have dozens of work orders a year, and although the overall campaign would be high value, the CSAs themselves would be relatively low dollar values. This was causing a lot of friction with advertisers needing escalations and internal legal approvals for these high-volume, transactional agreements.
• The legal team at Snap decided to use clickwrap for their high-volume, low-value CSAs—what they now call an eCSA—allowing them to still use eSign for larger deals where legal was involved on both sides. 
• The eCSA is automatically generated by a rep through the Salesforce-Ironclad integration, and it’s a completely different counterparty experience. Instead of getting a pdf in their inbox, they go right to the table of Deliverables and can accept it right there.

The history of clickwrap agreements

“Click-through agreements are a variant of a practice that was commonplace in the ‘80s. When software was sold in cardboard boxes and retail stores, there was plastic shrinkwrap around the boxes that said ‘If you take off the shrinkwrap, you’re agreeing to licensed terms that are enclosed in the box.’

That process was called ‘shrink wrap licensing,’ so when software distribution moved online, vendors tried to do the same thing in a virtual context. This would include a user interaction flow that would start with terms that the consumer would agree to before they could access the software. It’s essentially the virtual removal of shrinkwrap.” – Eric Goldman, Professor of Law, Santa Clara University

Are clickwrap agreements widely accepted by courts today?

“The probability of enforcement is extremely high. We’re talking about a 99% chance of enforcement.The problem is that we see poor implementations of online click-throughs and those contracts are less enforceable. As long as the person implementing the contract uses state of the art techniques, they have extremely high odds of enforcement—as good as the offline world, maybe even better.” – Eric Goldman, Professor of Law, Santa Clara University

What does the future of clickwrap and contracting look like?

“I think click-through agreements that are properly executed will continue to be highly enforceable. However, I think courts are effectively raising the bar on what they expect from vendors, and that requires people to pay attention.” – Eric Goldman, Professor of Law, Santa Clara University

Thanks for joining us for the highlights of State of Digital Contracting Fall. If you’re interested in learning more about how clickwrap and digital contracting can work together for your business, request a demo here.