Ironclad CEO talks legal software and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs

Last week the company secured $23M funding for AI exploration and customer support expansion

Ironclad is a company that develops software to help lawyers increase efficiency in contract management. The San Francisco-based company announced that it received $23 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital, Accel, and Y Combinator. This is on top of a Series A round raised back in 2017, when Ironclad brought in $8M.

I had a chance to interview Jason Boehmig, CEO and co-founder of Ironclad to learn more about Ironclad and how it works!

What inspired the creation of Ironclad?

I had been working as a lawyer in Mountain View and had some coding background. It occurred to me that software exists for every role in a company but for lawyers. Lawyers make up a small fraction of a team in terms of numbers, but the legal team is one of the most leveraged parts of an organization.

How does Ironclad software help lawyers with their day-to-day work?

Our software helps teams to communicate efficiently to make contracts faster. Teams can collaborate using this software in a way that can take contract development from weeks to hours. This software can help to generate the right legal language, and it automatically stores files in Dropbox or Google Drive. Furthermore, any time a member of the legal team receives a new version of a contract, the edits are underlined.

You're targeting lawyers inside companies; what type of contracts are they working on, typically? Sales contracts?

Ironclad is the only platform that supports all types of contracts. Some platforms are point solutions, meaning they focus on a single contract type like sales. Our core use case is the company’s legal team, and they are the central hub for all contracts inside an organization. Ironclad does it all--whether it’s collaborating with the marketing team on Influencer Agreements, the procurement team on Vendor Agreements, or the product team on Data Processing Agreements.

Can you give me a case study so our readers can really understand how the software works?

Many examples available on our blog; one cool one here.

Who's your target company customer? Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 or startups or all of the above?

We work with big companies. Some of them have smaller legal teams, and some have lawyers in the hundreds. Our smallest customers have a one person legal team.

How many companies do you work with now?

In the hundreds.

How do companies pay for Ironclad? Is it a fee per contract? Per lawyer?

We don’t put walls around our product so we charge a flat platform fee and then an additional fee per custom contract type that our users put on the system. There are no per user or per contract fees.

What will you do with the new funds?

I go into detail on this in my blog.

What advice would you share with aspiring entrepreneurs?

Invest a lot in finding a good co-founder. Cai (co-founder) and I work so well together because we have strong interpersonal chemistry and we each have a great deal of respect and admiration for what the other does for our company.

Stick to your gut. In the early stages of this company, many people told us that we shouldn’t make software for lawyers, and that we’d be better off targeting some other profession, but we really believed that lawyers deserve world-class software and would use it and share it with their friends if it existed.

(Image source: CNBC)