How Bitmovin Reduced Contracting Costs by 75% with Ironclad

Founded in 2012, Bitmovin had a clear mission: to build best in class video development solutions that enable the creation of memorable digital experiences. The company has earned customer trust and won awards for doing exactly that, but its deals were being delayed by sales contracts. Ken Carter, Bitmovin’s General Counsel and one-person legal team, needed to make contracts smarter and faster for the globally distributed company.

“Our contract process wasn’t broken. It was nonexistent,” said Ken. However, since he helped the company to implement Ironclad in 2018, Bitmovin now has a sales contract cycle that is as short as three hours, from contract request to signature. With offices across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Bitmovin also minimized delays for teams in different time zones and cut costs of doing contracts by 75%.

Managed by a solo GC, Bitmovin’s contract process faced two major blockers: creating and negotiating sales contracts was time-consuming and costly, and the lack of centralized contract storage added inefficiency. 

“Time kills deals,” Ken told us. Because contracts weren’t standardized based on the products, every sales agreement took a significant amount of time to understand and negotiate. “We’re a distributed organization with sales offices across the world. If they have to wait for me to get up or for outside counsel, that adds latency to the deal cycle.” 

Further, because contracts were spread across five different systems, there was no consistent way to find contracts. “We spent an inordinate amount of time just getting everything into one place,” said Ken.

Bitmovin identified Ironclad as the best solution to handle sales, HR, and a wide variety of agreements. And since being implemented in 2018, Ironclad has resulted in record efficiency gains and cost savings. “Based on what we’re saving — no outside counsel, no paralegal, no slipped deals — Ironclad is paid for in a couple of days,” Ken said. 

Bitmovin has built a whopping 75 contract workflows in two years, quickly becoming one of the most prolific users of Ironclad. Not only are sales reps self-serving contracts, but the HR team is also handling a variety of agreements with minimal input from Ken. In fact, the HR team has become the most active user of Ironclad, generating the most documents and creating many of the new workflows. 

Ken notes the importance of their streamlined contract process for the larger goals of the company. “With Ironclad, we’re helping the company get to a state of fast revenue growth and clean contracts,” said Ken. “We are more valuable if we are an efficiently-run and cleanly-managed organization.”

One of the key reasons Ironclad has been so widely embraced at Bitmovin is “it’s just fun to use,” said Ken. Some teams even started timing the contract process to see if they can break their own records. “Our CEO asked in front of the whole company, ‘What’s our record now?’ Ken told us. He and the teams had just gotten the process down to less than four minutes. “It then dawned on me just how important what we were doing was.” 

One of Ken’s favorite memories with Ironclad was delving into Workflow Designer, with conditionalities that reminded him of the Boolean logic familiar to lawyers. The first workflow he built was an NDA. “It’s so easy any second grader can do it,” Ken told us. Then he started building more advanced workflows, like order forms. “One day I was sitting there, clicking away on Workflow Designer, and my wife looked up and said ‘What on earth is so cool?’ because I kept saying ‘This is so cool!’” 

Today, Ironclad is relied on by Bitmovin’s global team, from sales reps self-serving contracts around the world to the HR team creating offer letters in Klagenfurt, Austria. The digital contracting platform has become a fixture at the company. “We simply couldn’t do what we do without a system like Ironclad. It’s just not possible.”