Can you explain the value of LegalSifter and the problems it solves?
LegalSifter delivers contract-specific AI and SAAS products and services to help companies review, organize, and manage their contracts. We bring pragmatic AI solutions to address some of the biggest challenges, including reviewing third party contracts and extracting critical data from your contract repository. Our focus is delivering a reliable, high level of quality to our customers, with the option to have human involvement through services. This is true from our approach to playbook architecture and quality assurance on redline contracts, to providing white glove service around AI data extraction, as well as a broader contract-operations-as-a-service offering. We are building on the company’s legacy service line capabilities, which gives us the advantage of knowing what it takes to do this work manually, what quality looks like, and if AI is giving us a high quality answer. When we need to improve the technology, we add a service layer to ensure an exceptionally efficient and reliable customer experience.
What attracted you to LegalSifter and why did you join the company?
I was attracted by the opportunity to collaborate with great people in an interesting space. Working with Carrick was an important consideration. I worked with members of the Carrick team 15 years ago, so I knew who they were and how they did business. I was also excited about helping to carve out a rapidly developing company in the transformative, legal-tech AI space. LegalSifter’s capabilities and intellectual property are an important foundation for greater, future success. I have spent a big part of my career delivering results in organizations where professional services are instrumental in helping technology to work. I personally have a strong understanding of what it looks like to help drive success for a technology and services business like LegalSifter.
How do you plan to leverage your legal education and experience across marketing, customer success, and other commercial functions to strengthen LegalSifter’s position?
We are in the process of transforming what has been a services-business-with-technology to a technology business that leverages services in the last mile. We are bringing new technology to the market and converting older versions of technology and services to AI-based tech.
To drive this kind of transformation, you must get a lot of things to work together correctly and in concert. When you bring together professional services, marketing, product, customer success, sales and all the other pieces, it is helpful to have been a primary leader in many of these functions. We do not have the luxury of being out of sync. My experience and ability to help everyone bring the components together is helpful in this type of situation. I also think experiences from the earlier parts of my career have given me the ability to come in with a blank sheet of paper and solve problems from first principles, rather than relying on a preconceived notion of how things should work.
Another area of my experience that is proving useful is the ability to think through how contract issues are going to work in practice from the mindset of a primary customer. When I was running global professional services at Adobe, contracts required so much back and forth with procurement and legal. I know firsthand how important it is to standardize contracts. It did not need to be as messy or complex as it was, but until you have contracts standardized to a playbook, you do not have an alternative.
What trends are you seeing in this market?
This is a very frothy market. Every VC and PE firm seem to have an investment in legal-tech. Some companies are trying to do truly innovative things. Then there are companies trying to put a user interface wrapper on top other large language models. There are also legacy CLMs trying to survive by marketing themselves as having AI capabilities. All this noise makes it hard for customers and prospects to discern what constitutes quality. Nobody knows how the actual categories are going to settle out.
What this means for LegalSifter is that we need to be focused on delivering measurable, pragmatic impact to our customers, so they get value from the product almost immediately. We need to constantly innovate to stay ahead of competitors around us.
What are three ways in which LegalSifter is differentiated?
The first is that LegalSifter has ten years of contract specific AI experience. LegalSifter was doing innovative work with natural language processing AI models when it was founded and has built intellectual property around contract specific capabilities when it comes to recognizing and interpreting contract language. We have more than 2,200 “Sifters.” You might think of them as mini-AI agents. They are highly capable of understanding individual types of clauses and contracts. This is intellectual property that most companies do not have.
Second, we have the advantage of breadth in that we have very robust CLM in Contract Logix, and we have robust contract AI capability in ReviewPro. We also have the ability to perform contract data extraction with a combination of artificial and human intelligence to ensure quality of that data extraction in our LegalSifter Organize solution. That breadth is an unmatched advantage.
Third is our service capability. We help customers get it right. Whether with the playbook architecture or data extraction or operating the CLM, we are willing to provide services that ensure that our products will work. This sort of quality guarantee is unique.
Since stepping into the CEO role, what changes have you implemented that led to early wins for the company?
We are reducing the number of clarified lines of business and standardized commercial approaches and focusing on marketing and product marketing. Additionally, we are becoming a strong engineering development organization and augmenting our technology capabilities. Our new CTO has brought together our engineering and development teams. We are getting a lot more strength out of having those capabilities, working across products, and bringing together different expertise and aspects of the business.
What are the benefits of working with a group like Carrick Capital Partners?
It is beneficial to collaborate with people who have their own deep operational business leadership experience. The people at Carrick have been major operators and that really matters. Carrick is our only owner, and we have an incredibly strong partnership. We are totally aligned in what we are trying to do. We have an active, open, transparent problem solving dialogue that is highly productive.
What is your advice for other growing businesses considering private equity?
If you are considering working with private equity, you need to know your own growth thesis and look for a private equity company that shares that thesis and is also in a position to actively support it. You want to think through the complementary capabilities your organization needs, which a private equity firm might bring. You also want to consider how the PE firm operates and how your company operates to ensure cultural alignment. I have a strong cultural alignment with Carrick, so it is seamless. For partnerships where that is not the case, I think it could be maddening.
What is next for LegalSifter/what are the priorities that you are working on right now?
We have recently brought exciting innovation to market with our ReviewPro Contract AI product as well as capabilities around AI-driven data extraction within our Contract Logix product. We are actively focused on refining our product market fit, our ICP and the value proposition we offer different companies and departments. We need to articulate the impact that these products have with different types of leaders and businesses.
There is a lot more we want to do with contract review and redlining. There are obvious ways that we are going to make that product more robust. We are in that phase of aggressively driving growth and continuing to innovate. Things are changing every couple of weeks in terms of what the products are capable of doing.
What is your long-term vision for LegalSifter?
Using AI is still an interesting new idea. But eventually, it will be the norm and the expectation. Our long-term vision for LegalSifter is to be the standard that is behind how businesses reach agreements and sell products and services, rather than attorneys manually hashing out minutia. We are on the journey of going from an innovative new thing to becoming a benchmark of productivity and quality.
