Leveraging Ironclad as part of our procurement process has made the process easier.
SöREN PETSCHSenior Director of Procurement, Root Insurance
Root Insurance prices car insurance based on how people actually drive, a telematics model that depends on data and the company’s own machine learning to work. That same appetite for data-driven precision shaped how their procurement team approached a longstanding problem: a legal review process that had become the biggest bottleneck in getting contracts signed. By integrating Ironclad into its procurement workflow, Root increased contract throughput by about 20% without adding legal headcount.
The challenge: A legal review process spread across too many inboxes
Sören Petsch leads procurement at Root Insurance, with a remit spanning finance, AI, and procurement automation. Procurement quarterbacks the full buying and contracting process end to end: requester to vendor, legal, InfoSec, finance, privacy, AP, and approvals.
Legal review was the recurring bottleneck. Redlines and comments lived in different documents with no single source of truth for where a deal stood. “We had issues with version control,” Petsch said. “Vendor contracts got stuck in people’s inboxes, on shared drives, in different versions.” No single team owned the friction; it was spread across everyone who touched a contract. “Everybody owned a piece of the inefficiency,” he said.
After evaluating several contract lifecycle management providers, Root’s legal team chose Ironclad for its redlining, version control, and collaboration capabilities. The idea was to connect it directly to the existing orchestration layer that ran the rest of the buying process, so legal review would become one connected step in a single workflow instead of a separate system contracts fell into.
The solution: Wiring Ironclad into the process procurement already owned
Root adopted Ironclad as its contract collaboration layer for redlining, version control, legal review, commenting, and contract records. It integrated Ironclad fully into the procurement orchestration platform, so legal review could run inside the same connected process as everything else procurement touched.
Standing up Ironclad itself took about six to eight weeks, entirely no-code. “I certainly don’t have an engineering background, so that was very easy,” Petsch said. Connecting it to the orchestration layer took roughly another month, mapping fields, syncing comments and document versions, and making sure approvals were handed off cleanly between the two systems. Petsch built three workflows and completed the integration himself, without an engineer. “By standing up Ironclad, we didn’t create new pain points, we created only efficiencies,” he said.
Root’s privacy attorney and procurement team also built Ironclad’s AI playbooks together to guardrail the review from the start: procurement handles payment terms and jurisdiction, while the playbooks route the rest to legal. That lets commercial redlines, privacy review, and InfoSec input on data terms happen in parallel, inside the same document, instead of moving through separate reviewers in sequence. Training was light, and value showed up by week two.
The impact: 20% more throughput, without adding attorneys
Legal review now takes about six to seven workdays, including agreements that require privacy review, which Petsch called “really, really fast.” Total procurement throughput, including legal review, was up about 20% since implementing Ironclad. Root increased the monthly volume of standard agreements by more than 30%, while operating with one commercial attorney and support from a privacy attorney. Much of the gain traced back to eliminating redundant handling: contracts that once needed three or four passes now moved through in one or two. “Since every one of those contracts traveled through Ironclad, some part of that improvement is driven by Ironclad,” Petsch said.
Faster reviews also came with better terms, not just quicker ones. With commercial, privacy, and InfoSec review happening together, Root landed better limits of liability, better pricing, and more predictable delivery against month-end and quarter-end deadlines. For Root, faster review could not come at the expense of contractual protection. “One bad contract can far exceed the cost of one procurement headcount,” Petsch said, pointing to the exposure a weak data-security clause can create if a vendor is breached. Scaling contract volume, meanwhile, didn’t require scaling legal headcount: the team avoided hiring an additional commercial attorney and a dedicated privacy attorney, and outside counsel barely entered the picture, with just one agreement sent externally in six months.
What’s next
Petsch describes Root as still early in its use of Ironclad—in the “second inning”—with much of the platform’s AI functionality still ahead. He expects upcoming capabilities, including a more connected contract database and Ironclad’s Contract Review Agent, to help move low-risk, low-dollar reviews out of the legal queue so procurement can complete them with AI assistance, freeing up legal’s time for more complex agreements. “The risk if we don’t use Ironclad is that we would regress,” Petsch said. His recommendation to other procurement teams is direct: “I would recommend Ironclad. It’s a best-in-class tool. It is truly no-code.”