Elevating the Role of Contracts Within the Enterprise
Eric Laughlin, CEO of Agiloft, talks about the
evolution of contract lifecycle management, how the pandemic has heightened awareness of blind spots that many companies have around contracts, and why the most successful organizations think of their contracts as “relationship DNA.”
to be supercharged in terms of sales and marketing and alliances. So after working with the founding team, I helped them raise capital – and then I joined as CEO. Tell us what solutions Agiloft offers enterprises in their contract management process.
Eric Laughlin: I’ve spent my career in legal tech and in tech-enabled services, and over the years, I’ve worked with legal departments undergoing transformation – and that’s what gets me excited. I see the possibilities when legal departments embrace modern approaches to processes, and particularly contracts. And that’s what I want to be part of. Agiloft was particularly attractive to me because of its contract lifecycle management platform, which is our core offering. We don’t think of it as legal tech, but rather as enterprise technology. We’re on a mission to elevate the contract and make it a firstclass citizen within the enterprise. To do that, we offer enterprise-grade software that connects contracting professionals to their internal clients. It allows them to fully embrace contracts as data, not just as documents.
At its core, our platform is a contract lifecycle management (CLM) software platform. It really is fully featured, end to end, all the way from requesting contracts to authoring contracts – meaning collaboration and clause libraries, playbooks, routing approvals and signing contracts, contract repository, and analytics on top of that repository. And then there’s the ability to manage your obligations that underlie the contracts in the system. Under the hood, we’ve developed robust artificial intelligence that rivals anything in a legal engine. And the amazing thing is that underlying our CLM application is the Agiloft platform itself, which takes a no-code approach to enterprise software. Agiloft was founded on the idea that enterprise software should be more successful than it is, and that some of the failure points around enterprise software are around the configurability and custom code that becomes brittle. So Agiloft was built as a no-code platform, and the CLM platform is an amazing use case for that, because that agile approach to software really responds to the changing needs of the business, including the changing needs of the contract department over time.
I actually started working with Agiloft while I was still with EY. We set up a partnership with Agiloft, and a few months later I started consulting with Agiloft, and I helped Colin Earl, the founder, raise capital from FTV. I knew it was the first thing we needed to do to make this company great, because Agiloft has been around for quite some time and has an amazing product foundation. It had already proven its ability to execute with 600 customers, and it was ready
We have some of the most impactful organizations in the world as our customers – in technology, pharma, health care, defense, manufacturing, government, education. I think one of the things that they all have in common is that they value the contract as more than a shield. They value a contract as relationship DNA, and as a valuable data asset for the company. I think that’s a really important approach to take when you think about contracts.
You joined Agiloft in August 2020, as the CEO, after the company received a $45 million growth equity investment from FTV Capital. Please tell us about Agiloft and what drew you to this opportunity.
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MARCH • APRIL 2021
