CHALLENGE:
Duplicate metadata and workflows slowing legal operations
The company had been using Ironclad as its contract management system for several years. While the platform was built internally to support evolving business needs, the lack of standardization over time led to significant duplication across both metadata and workflows. This made searching, filtering, and reporting time-consuming and unreliable.
The duplicate workflows were capturing identical information in parallel. This created confusion around which workflow should be followed for the most recent information. These inefficiencies were felt most acutely by the legal team, who depended on Ironclad for day-to-day contract operations.
Recognizing the growing risk to data reliability and system usability, they partnered with Spaulding Ridge to standardize their workflows, metadata, and environments to create a more trusted and dependable contract management system.
SOLUTION:
Cleaning metadata and consolidating workflows
We partnered with the global climate innovator to streamline and optimize their existing Ironclad implementation across both demo and production environments. The engagement began with a detailed review of the data manager to identify unused, duplicate, and inconsistently applied properties.
Duplicate properties that represented the same information were merged so that all data would live under a single standardized field. To ensure no data was lost in the process, properties that were no longer needed but might be useful in the future were hidden instead of deleted, preserving flexibility while reducing visual clutter.
We consolidated parallel workflows, capturing identical information into a single standardized version. This reduced the earlier confusion with numerous workflows for users and ensured everyone followed the same process. We also introduced automated entity selection into workflows, ensuring contract data is captured and stored consistently without manual intervention. This initiative identified more than 100 unused properties and numerous redundant workflows.
They had a number of AI clauses enabled within Ironclad. While beneficial, this cluttered the system with unwanted selections. We hid unused AI clause detections, allowing users to focus only on clauses relevant to their operations. Through these changes, the company now has a more structured, intuitive, and efficient environment that better supports searching, reporting, and long-term data governance.
RESULTS:
113 unused properties removed and 11 duplicate workflows standardized
By eliminating redundancy, standardizing data structures, and simplifying workflows, the optimized Ironclad environment became easier to navigate, more reliable for reporting, and far better aligned with day-to-day legal operations. The following results highlight the tangible outcomes achieved through this system optimization initiative:
- Simplified the Ironclad system by removing 113 unused properties and hiding 64 in the demo environment and removing 44 unused properties while hiding 76 in production.
- Standardized contract data by merging 39 duplicate properties across both environments, consolidating multiple variations into a single, trusted field.
- Reduced system noise by hiding over 160 unused AI clause detections, helping users quickly focus on relevant clause insights.
- Streamlined contract processes by consolidating 11 duplicate workflows into single, standardized workflows, eliminating confusion around process selection.
- Improved search and reporting capabilities by centralizing metadata and removing redundancy, resulting in faster and more reliable access to information.
- Increased efficiency and consistency for the legal team by delivering a cleaner, easier-to-use contract management system.
