Ironclad Makes Former Docusign CEO Dan Springer New Leader (1)

Ironclad Inc. has hired former Docusign CEO Dan Springer as its new leader, with co-founder and outgoing CEO Jason Boehmig becoming executive chairman.

Both Springer and Boehmig start in their new roles at Ironclad, a major provider of contract lifecycle management software, on Monday.

Springer departed as Docusign CEO in 2022, and resigned from the Docusign board on Apr. 24. Springer said talked to about 40 companies in weighing his next step after Docusign.

Ironclad’s steady growth rate was a big part of the draw for him, he said.

“Growth has become so challenged in the software space coming out of the challenges with COVID,” he said. “So that’s been hard to find a company that’s growing 40% a year.”

The company has surpassed $150 million in annual recurring revenue, a data point it is sharing publicly for the first time. It has more than 2,000 customers, including OpenAI, L’Oréal, Heineken, and Salesforce, Boehmig said.

With the hiring of a new CEO, Boehmig, who founded Ironclad in 2014, gets the freedom to pursue other company priorities. Those include expanding its offering of generative AI products, including the further development of Jurist, a generative AI legal assistant, he said.

“I’m actually excited to get back into some of the stuff that I really love doing, that I haven’t had as much time to do,” he said.

Boehmig said he was an early believer in artificial intelligence, impressed when IBM’s Watson supercomputer won Jeopardy in 2011. It wasn’t long after that, the former Fenwick & West attorney said, that he saw the potential for AI to transform legal work. The technology wasn’t yet good enough to create the kind of legal assistant Boehmig envisioned.

But now, it’s powering Ironclad’s growth, he said.

“I do think that that’s why we’ve sort of been gaining market share aggressively in CLM the past few years,” he said.

Everyone is now interested in contract management, Springer said, even if it’s in a spreadsheet, and more companies are relying on software.

“The reality is if you’re running any meaningful company,” he said,"you know you should be thinking of CLM.”

Bloomberg Law competes with Ironclad to provide contract software.