They say you are what you eat — which I certainly hope isn’t true because I’m not prepared to pack it in for the life of a jovial rancher — but it’s a good model for looking at a business. For all the corporate management talking points, companies aren’t “families” as much as they’re bundles of contractual obligations.
Whether it’s coming in or going out, the deals a company forges define the company’s path. Keeping track of all those deals is the balanced diet of a corporation and having the stored knowledge of those deals accessible to everyone who might need them — whether it’s legal or sales or marketing or whatever — is invaluable.
Which is where Ironclad’s new Insights feature fits in.
“Because contracts are legally binding and used across every business function, contract data has an incredibly high degree of integrity – and effectively contains all knowledge about a business,” said Steven Yan, SVP of Product at Ironclad. “Ironclad Insights is democratizing operational analytics, giving any department in the company a real-time understanding of the business, without needing an analytics team or technical resources.”
“Democratizing” has a bit of corporate buzzspeak to it, but it just means that the critical lessons lurking in a company’s body of deals shouldn’t be hiding behind a bunch of gatekeepers. Whether it’s a technical issue or a greedy legal team, there are a lot of people who can benefit from what’s in those deals and Ironclad aims to open up that data to all those users.
Any department can “create visualizations of crucial operational and business data to make faster decisions, pinpoint bottlenecks, and present findings in a digestible way for key stakeholders.” Legal can track execution time and thorny language bottlenecks, sales can dig into sales cycles, procurement can track renewal dates.
Insights grabs data from the whole contract lifecycle and metadata in the contracts themselves and then delivers both out-of-the-box reports and a highly customizable interface for users to craft the reports that work best for them.
After a few years of legal technology coalescing around the idea of “analytics” and then focusing on building user-friendly visualizations of those analytics, maybe we’re entering the democratization period where the new hotness is how easily vendors can deliver data in different forms for different audiences.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
