With Ironclad's Smart Import, uploading legacy contracts is 40-50% faster and we get 2-3 times more contract data than before. It solves one of my biggest pain points.
Running a company is a mammoth feat for anyone. Rippling is on a mission to make that easier by automating the administrative work involved. It’s no surprise, then, that Rippling found a match in Ironclad—with a similar goal of freeing teams from routine contracting work. Led by Legal and Compliance Analyst Daniela Lagoteta, implementing Ironclad has allowed the lean legal team to drive faster agreements, create a data-rich single source of truth, and be an effective partner for other departments.
“The sky’s the limit”: Ironclad accelerating business
Daniela Lagoteta joined Rippling in Fall 2019 to lead implementation of contract management.
Before then, Daniela, who hails from Calabria, Italy, earned her law degree in Rome and worked at a San Francisco law firm. After nearly a decade, she was searching for a new challenge and found Rippling’s philosophy matched her own. “The way the company thinks about work is how I think about it: making things more efficient.”
Rippling had already signed on with Ironclad, and Daniela’s main initiative as the second legal hire was going to be implementing the platform. The primary challenge Rippling was trying to solve with CLM was accelerating contract generation and location so the three-person legal team can serve the company efficiently.
“Our biggest goal is to be not a blocker, but an enabler for the business,” Daniela said. “If our teams have to wait two days to have a contract tracked down, that’s not ideal because it’s blocking them from executing something that will bring us revenue.”
Rippling’s General Counsel Vanessa Wu found Ironclad was the best solution for them based on their business priorities. Not only is Ironclad able to handle all contract types and provide an end-to-end solution, but it’s “easy to implement and use”—key for a small legal team.
The sky's the limit once you master Ironclad. It's very intuitive so it was easy to implement and learn.
“The sky’s the limit once you master Ironclad,” Daniela said. Daniela implemented Ironclad by first learning Workflow Designer herself before providing training to the rest of the company. “We didn’t need to explain much. Once you log on, it basically guides you through the process. Ironclad is very intuitive so it was easy to implement and learn.”
Teams across the company were excited about the newfound ability to self serve contracts through workflows. “They didn’t need to come to us to access contracts or find out whether they’re up to date or how to get them signed,” Daniela told us. “Ironclad streamlines the whole process and eliminates the back and forths. It made closing contracts way faster and my job way easier.”
Smart Import provides an elegant single source of truth
One of the most exciting features for Daniela has been Smart Import. With most CLMs, for each legacy contract uploaded to the software, one has to input all the metadata manually. One contract could take about 10 minutes; hundreds of contracts could take weeks. Thousands of contracts would be simply unfeasible for one person to handle.
Ironclad’s Smart Import allowed Daniela to create a single source of truth by uploading legacy contracts to Dynamic Repository (her favorite feature) and automatically filling in the metadata. With high accuracy, Smart Import fills 10 metadata fields, including company names, signers, and more.
“Now I’m able to upload as many contracts as I want at once and just confirm the data pulled automatically by Smart Import,” Daniel told us. “Uploading legacy contracts is 40-50% faster now than with manual import and tagging, and we get 2-3 times more data for uploaded contracts than before.”
Customers like Daniela work closely with the Ironclad team to test new features that solve key pain points. As she explained, “Smart Import solves one of the biggest pain points for me and other legal teams, which is transferring legacy contracts to a CLM solution. That’s why I was so excited about it,” she said.
Having a single source of truth has transformed contracting at the company. “Now, I don’t have to search and ask teams one by one for the same contract because we aren’t sure who has it. This manual process takes days and is not efficient. Because of Ironclad, there’s a one-stop shop for everything,” Daniela said.
Ironclad streamlines the whole process and eliminates the back and forths. It made closing contracts way faster and my job way easier.
Making sales agreements and NDAs a breeze
Ironclad has been widely adopted at Rippling and is heavily used by the sales team. “The sales team is the biggest user of Ironclad, and they really appreciate it,” Daniela shared.
“For example, there used to be three different versions of one sales contract just because one clause was different. With Ironclad, everything is standardized and streamlined. There is just one version,” she said. Depending on the answer the internal user provides, clauses will either pop up or not, making it easy for salespeople to use the right contract without consulting the legal team.
NDAs are also a breeze now. “If anyone needs an NDA, they know exactly where to go—Ironclad. They can start it, send it to the client, get the signature back, and have it stored, all without coming to the legal team. That’s my favorite part,” said Daniela.
What advice would Daniela give to professionals that are considering a CLM but aren’t sure how to go about it?
“First, know your goals. What are the biggest pain points you’re trying to solve? Then, demos demos demos—that’s crucial for evaluating CLMs. Lastly, be open to new technology and new ways of doing things,” she said.
“We just had our business review and it’s amazing to see how many contracts we closed and how many people have embraced Ironclad.”
Because of Ironclad, there’s a one-stop shop for everything.
- 50% faster legacy contract import
- 3 times more contract data
- 10 metadata fields automatically populated for uploaded contracts