My photo library turns me into an intrepid explorer, spelunking through time and place. All those pictures of conferences and whiteboards become a treasure-trove of past lives, ideas and dreams. In this post I will take a look back over the past five years or so, from our “Smart Clause” mission as Clause.io, to the latest Intelligent Agreement Management developments at Docusign.

Disclaimer: I don’t make any promises about products, timelines or roadmap; that is not my role, and the past shows that progress is not a straight line, but is a meandering river — so don’t use any of this article to make purchasing decisions!

So, in the words of Eric Zenz, hop in my Deloren and let’s accelerate to 80 miles per hour!

In June 2019, Diana Lease, Adrian Fletcher, Parsa Pezeshki, Houman Shadab and I attended Docusign Momentum, invited by Docusign to present Clause.io (acquired by Docusign in 2021) in the Solutions Expo, and to feature in an innovation demo presented by then Docusign COO Scott Olrich and CPO Ron Hirson, assisted by Product Managers Eric Zenz and Drew Ashlock.

The first part of the demo shows data entered by a signer (so called, “recipient fields”) being verified in realtime to prevent Not In Good Order (NIGO) envelopes. That feature is now generally available as Docusign Data Verification (with Parsa as the Product Manager) with an ever growing list of 3rd-party data sources supported!

Data Verification is powered by Docusign’s API integration/connector platform, and connectors use Accord Project Concerto (maintained by Docusign) as the definition for API contracts; ensuring well-structured data flows into and out of the platform.

The second part of the demo shows driver information being periodically re-verified post-signature, based on business requirement to re-validate drivers when their license expires or they get traffic violations. This requires that every signed contract becomes a running program, capable of executing business logic when events occur, or when time passes, a so-called Smart Legal Contract. The Clause.io platform associated this business logic with the legal text of a clause (making it a Smart Clause), allowing a legal contract to be composed from multiple Smart Clauses, each with its business and integration logic associated.

While Docusign doesn’t support Smart Clauses today, the company has not stood still, and announced Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM), a deepening and refinement of the Docusign Agreement Cloud vision from 2019. IAM has necessitated a huge amount of engineering work under the waterline: everything from search/indexing, natural language processing, cloud hosting, databases, blob storage, access control, representation of structured data, Maestro workflows, as well as the Navigator user interface and much else. To say that the team of 2,000+ engineers has been busy is an understatement! The folks acquired from Clause.io have been particularly involved with how data is (re)presented across the entire IAM platform, ensuring that there is a semantically sound foundation for the data used to create, sign and manage agreements.

With firm IAM foundations now in place, we set our sights to many of the challenges that Clause.io identified back in 2017/18: getting trusted data into agreements, sharing it with systems of record and counter-parties, as well as composing agreements from clauses, and being able to ensure that the contract logic and automation logic for the clauses comes along for the ride, and is triggered at the right time. The symbolic AI yin to the Natural Language Processing yang of contract management!

I’m particularly excited by Docusign’s pivot to being a platform company: placing APIs and partners at the heart of what we build, allowing extensibility via Maestro workflows, Web Forms, Apps and the App marketplace.

Attend the Docusign Discover conference to learn more about building on the IAM platform.

A platform focus allows Docusign to reach far more developers and partners, who are creating the intelligent agreement management solutions necessary to fill the contract gap or agreement trap.

So, I’d say we are at the “end of the beginning” in the intelligent agreement management story, with lots more exciting innovations to come. Customers and partners are vital in writing the next chapters in the story, ensuring that IAM reaches all verticals, platforms and geographies, and helping us succeed in our collective mission to make coming to agreement more agreeable!