Ironclad takes what was a highly manual, inefficient process and makes it easy and enjoyable to collaborate on contracts across our departments.
Anik soodassociate general counsel & data privacy officer, benjamin moore
Benjamin Moore, a leader in paint, color and coatings, faced a familiar challenge for established organizations: managing contracts across multiple departments using outdated, disconnected systems. With operations spanning indirect procurement, sales agreements, and partnerships with independent retailers nationwide, the company’s legal department struggled to maintain visibility and control over its contracting processes.
The solution came through Ironclad, a modern contract lifecycle management platform that transformed how Benjamin Moore’s legal team operates while enabling better collaboration across departments.
The challenge: Legacy systems couldn’t scale
When Anik Sood joined Benjamin Moore as Associate General Counsel and Data Privacy Officer, he encountered a contracting landscape that reflected the company’s long history. Different departments had developed their own systems for managing contracts, creating silos that made comprehensive oversight nearly impossible.
“We had a lot of departments that had their own individual systems that might work for them, but made it difficult for each department to understand the entire picture,” Sood explained. “A shared drive structure was no longer going to cut it for a modern legal department.”
The indirect procurement team, led by Senior Manager Alejandra Ibanez, faced particular challenges with contract visibility. “The biggest need I have is visibility into contracts and when they’re expiring; which contracts do I have that have an auto-renewal,” she noted during the implementation process. “For contracts that we had pre-Ironclad, who knows if they expire or auto-renew?”
Benjamin Moore’s contracting volume complicated matters further. As Sood described it, “The volume is enormous” because the company purchases everything from small software licenses to multi-million dollar agreements. The existing systems couldn’t differentiate between contracts requiring different levels of review and approval.
Why Ironclad: Modern CLM that’s purpose-built
Having previously used Ironclad at another company, Sood brought valuable perspective to Benjamin Moore’s vendor selection process. His experience highlighted key advantages of Ironclad’s approach to contract management.
The legacy tools we were using weren’t built for contracts. Other CLMs are built on legacy tools that were used for something else. We needed to modernize the way we approached contracting, and Ironclad is a modern CLM.
anik soodassociate general counsel & data privacy officer, benjamin moore
The platform’s administrative capabilities proved equally important. Sood valued being able to “implement Ironclad without being an IT genius, demanding professional services time, or having to hire somebody to make each individual change. Without having to take six months to design workflows.”
For the indirect procurement team, “We were in the process of implementing another tool, but it was not very user friendly. When I looked at Ironclad, I thought, if these capabilities are true, it’s going to change everything for our team.”
Implementation: Phased rollout across contract types
Benjamin Moore’s implementation began with the simplest use case and expanded systematically across the organization. The rollout started with non-disclosure agreements, which Sood described as an introductory workflow that could be deployed quickly.
From there, the team tackled indirect procurement agreements, which required more complex workflows and approvals. The final phase brought sales agreements into the platform, acknowledging Benjamin Moore’s dual role as both buyer and seller in the market. Since Benjamin Moore sells exclusively through independent retailers, these agreements represent critical business relationships.
Throughout the rollout, Sood maintained control over workflow design and implementation without requiring external resources. “I haven’t needed a legal ops team to roll it out. I haven’t needed additional help really. I’ve been able to do a lot of that myself,” he noted.
Results: Visibility and efficiency gains
The implementation delivered measurable improvements across multiple dimensions of Benjamin Moore’s contract management operations.
Enhanced visibility and tracking
The platform fundamentally changed how business stakeholders interact with contracts. As Sood explained, “Ironclad gives business stakeholders a level of visibility into their contracts that they didn’t have before.”
Alejandra highlighted the transformation in procurement operations: “I consider myself very data oriented. Used to use a lot of spreadsheets to have a sense of performance of the team, how long we spend solving one contract. The human factor came in and the data wasn’t always good. The insights section is user friendly.”
Streamlined approvals and automation
Ironclad transformed Benjamin Moore’s contracting from a fragmented process into a collaborative one. “Ironclad takes what was a highly manual, inefficient process and makes it easy and enjoyable to collaborate on contracts across our departments,” Sood noted.
The workflow automation addressed Benjamin Moore’s need to handle contracts of varying complexity and value. “Ironclad allows us to individualize workflows to the value of the contract rather than having a single process that works for every single contract,” Sood explained. “We’re not necessarily going to look at every contract the same way. We need different approvals for $10 million contracts versus $10,000 contracts.”
The automation capabilities particularly benefited stakeholders outside the legal department. “We can input a contract, input some values, check some boxes, and suddenly have a workflow with all our approvals built in. That’s a great experience for stakeholders,” Sood described.
Improved audit capabilities
Benjamin Moore’s organizational and operational structure requires robust audit trails for all contracting activities. Ironclad addressed this need comprehensively.
“We’re finally in a state where we can point to any contract that we’ve signed and tell you exactly what the process was in terms of procurement to get there,” Sood noted. “Who approved it, what the process was, what we were trying to approve, what risks we were challenging, and to have all that information in a single place.”
This capability proved especially valuable for managing personnel changes and maintaining institutional knowledge over time.
Time savings and efficiency
The platform’s modern interface and AI capabilities delivered significant time savings. Sood highlighted the value of Jurist, Ironclad’s AI assistant, for translation work between English and French templates: “The ability to use Jurist for translations has saved me hours and hours of time.”
The AI capabilities proved particularly valuable for solving unexpected challenges.
Ironclad, its AI playbooks, and Jurist are helping us solve problems that we didn’t even know existed at the beginning of this journey.
Anik Soodassociate general counsel & data privacy officer, benjamin moore
More broadly, the system eliminated manual coordination efforts. As Alejandra observed, the old process required “lots of emails to solve one problem down to one automated process.”
Cost savings from system consolidation
The implementation delivered significant financial benefits by replacing multiple legacy systems. “Being able to consolidate multiple legacy systems into Ironclad has resulted in significant savings, both in terms of mental effort and actual monetary costs,” Sood explained. “The cost of implementing each legacy system individually could have been ‘backbreaking’ for the organization, but Ironclad has allowed us to avoid these high implementation costs.”
Advanced features: AI and continuous improvement
Benjamin Moore has embraced Ironclad’s newer AI capabilities, particularly for risk analysis and template management. “AI has created a lot of unique opportunities in contracting. With clause libraries and playbooks, you can take what you already have and analyze it,” Sood said. “Jurist takes that even further. Jurist is helping us translate contracts and workflows from English to French, for example. The ability to do that directly within Ironclad has saved me hours and hours of time.”
Sood verified the accuracy by comparing AI-generated translations with human translations from the company’s existing translation service, finding them to match “in almost all respects.”
Cost savings and consolidation
The implementation eliminated multiple legacy systems while reducing implementation costs. “We saved a lot of money in implementation because every time I process an implementation contract, I look at that and I say for the systems where this is required, it can be expensive,” Sood noted.
Beyond direct cost savings, the consolidation delivered operational benefits. The legal team no longer needed to coordinate across disparate systems or rely on external resources for workflow modifications.
Career and skill development impact
For Sood personally, implementing and managing Ironclad became a significant career development opportunity. “I think it’s a tremendous skill, the ability to do some of this work, to understand how it works, to take a system and understand how all CLM and tracking systems work,” he reflected.
The platform’s accessibility enabled broader skill development across the legal team. “With Ironclad, you don’t need to be a technologist. I can teach any member of my team how to create a workflow using Workflow Designer or how to create a report with Insights. I can administer the tool myself without being an IT genius,” Sood explained.
The premium brand imperative
For Benjamin Moore, efficient contract management supports its positioning as a premium brand in the paint industry. As Sood explained, “We represent and we exhibit in all ways as a premium brand, and we operate as such. Solutions like Ironclad help us do that.”
The improved contracting processes enable Benjamin Moore to be “better partners” with its network of independent retailers and other business relationships, supporting the company’s overall market positioning.
Ironclad is a very user friendly system. I don’t think that statement should be taken lightly. I was in a room with my procurement peers last year, and they were discussing the challenges they were having with other platforms. Reviewing contracts is a process that takes time, there are a lot of people involved; and I think Ironclad makes that process less painful.
alejandra ibanezsenior manager, indirect procurement, benjamin moore
For legal operations teams at established companies facing similar challenges with legacy systems and growing contract volumes, Benjamin Moore’s experience illustrates the potential for significant operational improvements through thoughtful technology adoption.