Harvey is partnering with California-based CLM Ironclad because of what CEO Winston Weinberg described to Artificial Lawyer as a ‘huge request from our inhouse customers’. It follows a deal with rival Icertis last year. Meanwhile, OpenAI is a client of Ironclad and an investor in Harvey.
This is also one of the first major strategic moves since Dan Springer (pictured), the new CEO of Ironclad – and once the CEO of DocuSign – took control of the ship in April after co-founder Jason Boehmig stood down as boss. Some of Ironclad’s customers include: Salesforce, Cisco and Shell… and OpenAI, as noted.
They will ‘begin working together to develop solutions to capitalize on the power that each platform provides’.
The goal is to combine ‘Ironclad’s intelligent, automated contract workflows’ with how ‘Harvey can surface company positions impacted by regulatory shifts or business model changes’. In short, it’s Harvey’s genAI + Ironclad’s workflows, underlined by mutual client needs that’s driving this.
It’s an interesting move for several reasons. First is the obvious one: this takes Harvey even deeper into the inhouse world and perhaps far beyond the mutual clients who have helped to drive this – and it also builds on the deal with Icertis.
The second point is that Ironclad has had an unusual relationship with AI for a company focused on contracts. Initially the company avoided NLP/ML on the basis that it wasn’t accurate enough – even though peers had embraced it early on. Then in September 2022 they hooked up with Google to provide ML/NLP AI doc analysis tools (see AL story here) – ironically just two months before ChatGPT arrived in November of that year and totally changed the contract AI field. And now, they’ve gone for what we can call a ‘genAI alliance’ with Harvey.
More broadly, a push deeper into inhouse makes total sense. While there are a limited number of major law firms which productivity platforms such as Harvey – and its rivals – can try to win over, the inhouse world is a way more target-rich environment.
However, winning inhouse teams is not easy. While some have highly focused legal tech experts on staff, those are a minority. So, having a CLM company as a partner is a great help as they’ve already done a lot of the hard work in terms of connecting to legal teams.
Clearly, for the mutual clients this is more about joining the dots, as it were, and connecting what Harvey does with what Ironclad offers. But, it also opens the door to building new relationships with Ironclad customers that Harvey is not yet close to.
Springer, CEO of Ironclad, commented: ‘This partnership is about bringing together two of the most powerful AI platforms in the legal tech ecosystem. Ironclad and Harvey are both exceptionally good at making lawyers more impactful, and in ways that accelerate the business as a whole. This partnership will unlock tremendous value for our customers.’
More about Ironclad here.
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