About The Contract Signal

This newsletter focuses on post-signature contract intelligence and related workflows: how enterprises can turn large volumes of complex contracts into structured data and analytics to enable better legal and business decisions.

If you are a member of legal ops, an in-house counsel, investor, founder or other professional who works with contracts or is interested in turning contracts into structured data, subscribe to follow along.

The lens I bring

I spent a little over 10 years focused on post-signature enterprise contract intelligence at Axiom and Knowable (a LexisNexis company), working across product, user research, taxonomy design, solution sales, contract analysis, structured data creation, traditional machine learning, and generative AI.

That gave me a cross-functional view of the market that is hard to get from the outside.

I’ve done direct end-user research with the people who actually work with contracts about practical workflows and pain points.

I’ve helped build contract AI products, from earlier machine learning systems involving annotation, training data, and evaluation workflows, to generative AI features integrated into client-facing SaaS software.

I’ve also worked on the commercial side, primarily in sales enablement: doing product demos, supporting sales executives with more targeted questions about the interplay between technology and business value, working on proposals, RFPs, change orders, proof-of-concepts, and production deployments.

And finally I’ve gone through contracts workflows myself: organizing repositories, finding agreements, extracting clause and data point information, testing different approaches, and seeing what worked and what didn’t in the context of high-pressure use cases ranging from an internal corporate spinoff to high-value sales pursuits.

Those experiences shaped one of my core beliefs: that the model is one part of a broader ecosystem of complementary capabilities. Those capabilities include the solution and workflow design, data strategy, evaluation framework, infrastructure, and UX that make AI output reliable and usable.

Before all of that, I earned a JD from Emory, focused on transactional law taught by real practitioners. I don’t practice law, but that training gave me the legal vocabulary and analytical grounding to recognize when legaltech is effectively solving a high-impact problem. In parallel, I’ve taken extensive computer science coursework and experiment with various AI tools to increase my technical depth and understanding of the art of the possible.

Why that matters

Most analysis of contract AI comes from one perspective at a time.

Some writers understand legal practice but haven’t built AI products. Some technologists understand models but not contract workflows or business impact. Some investors, founders and analysts understand the market but have incentives to promote specific companies or haven’t experienced the underlying product, delivery, and user-research realities.

As a result, over the last decade I’ve witnessed smart, well-resourced people repeatedly underestimate the complexity of enterprise contracts.

In 2020, credible people at a major technology company predicted they could capture the enterprise contracts market within months. In 2021, a client’s internal data science team believed they could automate much of what our business did in a matter of weeks. Neither prediction came close.

Despite that, I’m still bullish on AI and its application to contracts. AI can already do a lot, and its capabilities are improving quickly. However, those capabilities need to be taken in the context of enterprise contracts: high volumes of complex, fragmented documents with a range of industry-specific and organization-specific variables.

The Contract Signal is my attempt to write from an independent, cross-functional lens: legal domain and business understanding, contract workflow experience, product-building scar tissue, AI diligence and implementation experience, and an independent view of the market.

The goal is providing clear analysis of the contract AI space: the capabilities, the market dynamics, and how to incorporate it all to effectively solve problems.

If you work with contracts, buy or evaluate AI tools for legal workflows, build in this market, or want an independent read on where contracts AI is going, subscribe to follow along.