How Procore Uses Ironclad To Support Aggressive Growth

Procore is a global SaaS company specializing in construction management software. Its software revolutionized the traditionally low-tech construction industry, making it easy for construction firms to drastically increase project efficiency and accountability.
Since its 2003 founding, the company has grown so aggressively that today it is valued at over $1 billion, landing Procore in that elite stratosphere of companies known as “unicorns.”

Its aggressive growth goals put Procore’s under-resourced legal team in a unique and challenging place. With just two lawyers and four support staff supporting 1200+ employees, Procore Legal must nevertheless remain exceptionally committed to supporting business growth.

In this context, Procore’s Legal Team cannot afford to be business blockers. They must be business enablers. AGC Logan Maley (pictured right) explains: “It is important to me that management views the legal department as a partner in the business. My goal is always to get us to, ‘Yes, we can do that, and here is how’”–without exposing Procore to legal risks.

But when legal teams are as lean as Procore’s, it can be extremely challenging to surface real risks from volumes of paperwork. “We needed to be as nimble and fast as the rest of the company, and we didn’t want to throw bodies at problems we could solve with processes and technology,” says Maley. Procore Legal needed to support aggressive growth, without introducing blockers and risks to the business.

We worked with Procore to implement workflows for a number of their most important Procurement, Marketing, and Sales agreements. Ironclad gives Procore a faster, standardized process that organizationally transforms how Legal works with the rest of the business, whilst feeding Legal valuable process and substantive insights.

1. Workflow automation. Ironclad shepherds contracts through time-consuming and confusing business processes.
   • Contract creation. Procore’s latest templates are encoded into Ironclad, so lawyers no longer have to manage them and business users can use Ironclad to kickstart their own contracts.
   • Necessary approvals and risk-mitigating business processes are encoded into Ironclad.
   • Integrations. Ironclad automatically sends e-signature requests out and pushes/pulls information from Salesforce.
2. Searchable Repository. Ironclad automatically stores and makes searchable completed contracts in Procore’s cloud storage solution according to the proper naming conventions.

In addition to giving Procore reporting capabilities, Ironclad helps Procore Legal collaborate towards aggressive growth with their business counterparts, delegate business issues to the business, and reduce the company’s overall risk exposure.

Collaboration. By giving Procore’s cross-functional teams a single collaboration workspace for their contracts, Ironclad invites visibility into a process that was previously viewed as a “black box” by business parties.

Business enablement. Ironclad enables Procore Legal to be business enablers, rather than blockers. For example, before Ironclad, Procore’s Legal Team was responsible for all vendor contracts, even when they lacked relevant context. This clogged Legal pipeline and slowed the procurement process.

With Ironclad, most of the substantive issues in vendor contracts are now properly in Procurement’s domain. The Procurement Team can now manage the bulk of contract negotiations, leaving only the thorniest legal issues to Legal.

Reduced risk exposure. Version control of templates exposes legal teams to considerable risk. For example, recent case law held that the words “hereby assigns” actually function to assign IP, whereas, the words “hereby agrees to  assign” are merely a promise to make the assignment in the future. Tiny language changes like these can have tremendous implications for a company’s IP ownership.

Without Ironclad, the team would have had to manually track down outdated templates, or else run trainings to prevent people from using them to fix an error like this in their documents. Because Ironclad manages templates for Procore, Procore Legal wastes no time when it needs to update its templates and can be 100% certain the correct form is always being used across the company.