Ironclad is a contract lifecycle management platform used by companies to handle every type of contract workflow. Its founders believed that AI could revolutionize the way legal teams work on contracts. When Ironclad’s engineers started exploring OpenAI’s technology, they immediately saw the potential to bring more of that vision to life.
“One of our legal engineers realized GPT-4 could create convincing contract language,” said Cai GoGwilt, Ironclad’s Chief Architect. The team was most impressed with the level of control they could achieve.
What really piqued our interest was GPT-4’s ability to carefully follow instructions. We could use it to make minimal modifications to text, rather than completely rewriting it, which is critical to contract negotiations.
In March 2023, Ironclad launched a beta of its first generative AI application, AI Assist™. Developed using OpenAI technology, AI Assist™ empowers users to automate legal review by identifying and redlining irregularities in contracts. The product also provides pre-approved clauses and language guidelines based on company-specific AI Playbooks on the Ironclad platform, and supports ChatGPT-style text prompting.
A remarkable boost for legal teams
Ironclad’s goal in using AI has always been to help people do more, not to replace them with technology. GoGwilt recalled the initial excitement within his legal engineering team as they saw what OpenAI’s models could do for contracting. “There was the first moment of the team saying, ‘Wow, this is producing work at the level of a first-year associate,’” he said. The engineers quickly moved on to a prototype—and experienced another “wow” moment. “Integrating GPT-4 into our contract editor and just seeing how seamless and powerful it felt made it pretty easy for us to invest further into productizing and getting it to customers,” GoGwilt added.
Ironclad ported AI Assist™ to GPT-4 as soon as it launched in April 2023. Human oversight is baked into the workflow, giving users the ability to accept or reject all automated suggestions, and turn AI functionality off entirely as appropriate. In addition, Ironclad customers can be assured that their data is private; by default, OpenAI will not use data submitted via its API to train or improve its models.
The results with AI Assist™ have been beyond what we could even have imagined. An initial pass at contract redlining usually takes about 40 minutes. With AI Assist™, we’re seeing users complete them in two minutes.
To date, AI Assist™ has quickly become one of Ironclad’s most rapidly adopted features.
A tipping point in the legal field
The overwhelmingly positive feedback Ironcad has received from customers since launch underscores the transformative impact of AI Assist™ in the legal field. Ironclad’s vision is becoming a reality: legal teams are already more efficient thanks to AI, and future improvements seem inevitable. By combining innovation with circumspection and seeking to improve, not replace, human processes, Ironclad is paving the way for the legal industry to embrace the benefits of generative AI.