The ability to have line of sight [into] exactly what’s going on with our contracts in terms of how long it’s taking on each side, what kind of risk provisions exist in these contracts—that kind of data we just didn’t have before, and now we have it right at our fingertips.
Sean CondronVP of Commercial Transactions & Customer Trust Services
Proof helps secure more than 1 million digital transactions each year for 8,000 customers. As the company expanded from its roots in remote online notarization into identity verification and fraud detection, so did the complexity of the agreements behind its business. Contracts became an increasingly important source of information for teams across Proof and a record of the commitments it had made to thousands of customers.
The challenge: Contract data was fragmented at every stage
Proof’s teams were managing the contract process across disconnected tools. Sean Condron, vice president in Proof’s legal department, described the work before Ironclad as manual at every step: processing, negotiation, stakeholder review, approvals, tracking, contract analysis.
NDA review was similarly manual. Attorneys worked from a checklist, relying on suggested language or drafting redlines themselves as they reviewed each agreement.
“We had a checklist of what you would look for in an NDA, and then you would do the review of that, redline, have to come up with language on the spot, or try and pull it in from the checklist if we had some suggested language to use.”
The gaps continued after signature, in a different form. The commitments in a customer agreement are individually straightforward — notice periods, service-level credits, price-increase caps, security reporting cadences, data deletion on termination, limits on use of the customer’s name. Meeting them is an administrative problem more than a legal one. Each commitment is negotiated once, comes due months later, and lands on a function that wasn’t in the room for the negotiation. Legal owns the language. Someone else has to own the follow-through.
At Proof, that someone is Chelsea Rutter, Customer Trust Services Lead, who manages the company’s obligations — including commitments related to service-level agreements, price increases, termination details, and notice requirements. Before Ironclad, those obligations lived in large spreadsheets or had to be found by searching through individual agreements.
“And it wasn’t just one spreadsheet, it was multiple spreadsheets.”
Data in a spreadsheet could become stale or stop matching the contract. If information had never been captured, someone on the legal team had to find it manually. Legal became the gatekeeper for answers that sales, procurement, InfoSec, engineering, human resources, marketing, and customers needed to act.
Proof needed contract work and contract data to live together, so teams could move quickly without losing confidence in the source.
The solution: Connecting the contract lifecycle with Ironclad AI
Proof chose Ironclad for its ease of use and ability to support the full contract process. As the team expanded its use of the platform, it began layering AI into the workflow at key points across the contract lifecycle.
For contract review, Proof uses Contract Review Agent to give attorneys a first pass on NDAs grounded in the team’s own guidance. Using Proof’s NDA playbook as context, the agent can review an NDA on counterparty paper and suggest redlines and comments based on how the team approaches those agreements. Attorneys get a starting point to refine rather than beginning the review from scratch. The team is now fine-tuning its NDA playbook and expanding into customer and procurement agreements, with the customer agreement playbook ready for testing on new customer agreements that come into the queue.
Post-signature, Proof migrated obligation data from spreadsheets and individual contracts into Ironclad, creating a centralized system connected directly to the underlying agreements. Rutter manages the obligations database while stakeholders across InfoSec, engineering, HR, marketing, and commercial teams can access and act on assigned information. Proof tracks 25 to 30 main obligation types, along with additional sub-obligations and associated data.
Ironclad AI further reduces the manual work required to populate that database by extracting obligation data from agreements. As Proof has continued to build out the program, newer functionality has also expanded how the team can assign and manage recurring, one-time, and conditional obligations.
The impact: Trusted business intelligence at every stage
With contract work and data connected in Ironclad, Proof can put the right contract context in front of the people who need it—before and after signature.
For legal, that means more leverage as the business grows. Contract Review Agent has significantly reduced the time attorneys spend reviewing NDAs, giving the team more capacity to focus on judgment and negotiation.
“Contract Review Agent trims about 50 to 75% of the time we were spending on NDA reviews.”
Beyond individual reviews, having contract work and data in one system gives Proof greater visibility as the business grows. As contract volume increases, the legal team can keep pace without adding headcount at the same rate. At the same time, legal has greater visibility into the contracts moving through the business, from how long negotiations are taking to the risk provisions those agreements contain.
“The ability to have line of sight [into] exactly what’s going on with our contracts in terms of how long it’s taking on each side, what kind of risk provisions exist in these contracts—that kind of data we just didn’t have before, and now we have it right at our fingertips.”
After signature, that visibility becomes actionable. When Rutter was recently asked by Proof’s leadership team to identify customers with specific notice requirements, she surfaced the answer in a couple of minutes.
“Ironclad helped us centralize and structure our contracts, providing a clear and searchable source of truth. Now, we can identify customers with specific notice obligations in minutes instead of hours.”
That speed is changing legal’s role in the business. Instead of acting as the gatekeeper to contract information, legal can govern a source of truth that stakeholders can access themselves. Because obligation data is tied directly to the underlying agreement, teams can find answers quickly and act with confidence in their accuracy.
For Rutter, the ultimate impact is trust—internally and with Proof’s customers.
“The fact that we can be proactive in fulfilling obligations and share information back with them that is in line with the obligations we made when we executed the contract is huge in building that trust between us and our customers.”