HN user
Check us out at Ironclad! We were YC 15 and now work with hundreds of millions of contracts across a pretty diverse customer base. Would be happy to have our team take a look and see if we can get you what you need. https://ironcladapp.com/
Great product. Amazing how much time companies waste on inefficient meetings. Looking forward to seeing this in the wild.
Ironclad (YC S15) - San Francisco, CA (ONSITE)
Full stack software engineers (Node.js / React stack), Sales Development Reps (SDRs), Account Executives, Product Designer.
We make software for legal teams and we are the fastest growing legal technology company in Silicon Valley.
hn@ironcladapp.com
We're building this at Ironclad. Happy to show you, and it will be more widely available later this year.
This is fantastic, snooze is essential to my email flow and I've been waiting for N1 to release this. Love the additional features like emoji too. Keep it coming.
Thanks!
Hi sandworm, nice to speak with a fellow lawyer. We're not providing legal advice with Ironclad, on the site and in the article I think it's pretty clear that we're not trying to replace lawyers. What we are trying to do is give companies tools to keep better legal records, which is currently the domain of a bunch of fragmented software systems. Our goal is to tie those together.
So to answer your question, we use Ironclad to keep our legal records in order, and we use a lawyer for legal advice.
If you are a company set up on another structure, we can take the documents you're currently using (from your lawyer for instance) and set them up on the system for you. We're designed to be the infrastructure layer, not necessarily the ones coming up with the templates. But we do have those DE C-Corp templates up since many YC companies are set up that way.
Not yet, but always good to get the request for more features.
Awesome questions, will try to answer here:
How does Ironclad ensure that you'll "never lose a contract again"? Can you dictate what the folder structure will be and have Ironclad follow that automatically?
-Yes, you can!
Can you have it follow agreement naming conventions?
-Yes!
How does it handle successive iterations of a contract that is being negotiated?
-We are working on this, but there's some cool functionality built in to Dropbox already for collaboration. I'd suggest sharing the Dropbox folder that contains the doc and using those for now, they are pretty good.
Can you also store a record of emails/discussions regarding those negotiations with the contracts?
-We're working on this, but for now you still can use Dropbox comments, etc.
Haha, you got us there. Laughed out loud at this one.
That's what I like to hear! Excited to have you as a user. Let us know what else you want too. founders@ironcladapp.com
I think this is a really cool idea. One of the things we're designed to do, as the administrative layer, is take these conventions that are set up by experts and put them into software so that anyone can then execute on them. This would be a neat example.
Clerky is awesome. What we're going for here is more of the automated record keeping and management. It seems like most company's legal docs are a mess (and I know from reviewing lots of them when I was an attorney).
The templates we provide can help you automatically keep your company's legal folder in pristine condition - we're not just setting you up with the template, it's the whole process layer from end-to-end.
To be clear though, we don't provide any legal advice whatsoever. We're designed to work with an attorney - so that if you need them to edit Section 2.1 of a document before it gets sent out, you can just have them hop in to the Dropbox folder and make the edits. It's the administrative layer for legal, not the advice layer.
We want you to use the same template again and again! What we are really trying to provide is the administrative support layer that doesn't currently exist, or is being done by a human. So we help you fill in that template faster, we integrate with HelloSign so that it's sent out for signature automatically when you've approved it, and we create folders and store the final docs there for you when you're done.
It's more of an end-to-end approach than just dealing with templates. The idea is you'd pay Ironclad $49/month rather than pay an assistant way more than that to keep you organized. Does that make sense? Would love any feedback if you think of this differently.
Cool thanks! Would love to hear back from you once you've had a chance to use it and hear what you like and don't like. One thing that's been awesome about going through YC is really learning to take feedback from users. Give us a shout any time at founders@ironcladapp.com
Yep, that's our next integration. I didn't realize how popular it was until I started talking to companies either, so we're seeing the same thing.
This is an excellent bug report. Filed!
Correct in terms of default templates. Our default templates, which are used by YC companies typically, are designed by attorneys for Delaware C-Corps in California.
We are designed to be able to take in any type of legal document though, including docs you already have from your attorney. So if you're not using the default templates, or you've customized them yourself, that limitation won't apply.
Hi everyone! I'm one of the founders of Ironclad and would be happy to answer any questions you might have. Before starting Ironclad I was an attorney at Fenwick & West, and my co-founder was an engineer at Palantir. Let us know how we can help. We're excited to launch :)
This is very cool. Looking forward to trying it out.
Hey everyone, thanks a ton for your comments and interest. Now that we’ve had a chance to get some feedback, we’ll be closing up the site while we make improvements and get some of the things that you suggested in to the product. Please feel free to email admin@ironclad.ai if you’d like to get in touch. We really appreciate your feedback!
This is really smart. The number of companies that are sending out cards and gifts is huge, and it makes no sense for each of them to do it on their own. I love that this is consolidated in a service that still lets them keep the personal touch.
Thanks for the comment and generosity, this is a work in progress and I’m sorry it set off an alarm bell for you. We posted this to get some usability feedback on what we were working on, it’s not a fully built out description. As background, we’re aware of UPL and we are careful to not provide any form of legal advice. Ironclad is designed to be an administrative tool just like google, email or dropbox would be.
That said, we will take down the landing page and update the copy (which we’ve intended to do all along once we got some feedback). If you’re willing to take some time to talk to another HN user, I’d very much like to address your concerns, hear your feedback, and use any ideas you have for moving forward. Would you have some time on Monday? I’m at jwb119@gmail.com if you want to email me so we can set something up.
Awesome, yep we are very aware of this. Will be updating the copy and making it more clear going forward. Thanks for the encouragement!
We're definitely not a law firm and we're not giving legal advice. Will put some more info on this up soon - we want to make this better.
Cool, appreciate this feedback. The point of doing a Show HN was to make the product better and more clear, and this is helpful for getting that info. We'll work on it.
Is there anything else that interests you about the product that you'd want to know more about?
Email sent :)
This is really interesting, thanks for creating an account and commenting! I think that you're right - litigation related forms do have more complex requirements. That's one of the reasons we started with corporate documents, there seems to be a more common set of building blocks - smaller document sets, more routine requirements (like making sure everything gets signed and stored somewhere), etc. I'd be very interested to talk to you if you're up for a quick chat at some point about the litigation process though.