Branch cuts NDA turnaround from 26 days to 2 minutes with Ironclad Clickwrap

Branch, a global mobile growth and attribution platform based in Palo Alto, faced a compliance gap when remote work eliminated its in-office NDA signing process entirely. Interview candidates had previously signed physical copies on-site, but that workflow disappeared with the shift to distributed work — leaving confidential information exposed with no enforceable agreement in place. Beyond the NDA problem, legal had no visibility into contract cycle times across HR, sales, and procurement, and no data to demonstrate the team's operational impact or make the case for additional headcount. The status quo meant slow cycles, compliance risk, and a legal team operating blind.

Legal Ops Manager Daniel Michalek — who had previously implemented Ironclad at other companies — led Branch's expansion of the platform beyond its initial CLM deployment. The team implemented Ironclad Clickwrap to replace physical NDA signing with a one-click, legally binding digital process, starting with interview candidates before rolling out to vendors and sales prospects. A Salesforce integration automated contract routing through Ironclad's Workflow Designer, pulling in billing, security, and operations stakeholders without legal involvement. Ironclad Insights, the platform's analytics and business intelligence layer, was added to surface contract cycle time data, flag bottlenecks, and model workload distribution — giving legal a data-driven view of operations for the first time. Rollout followed an incremental approach: solve one pain point, prove value, then expand.

The impact on NDA turnaround was immediate and dramatic: signature time dropped from 26 days to 2 minutes, with over 3,000 NDAs executed via Clickwrap. Sales reps gained the ability to initiate NDAs directly through Salesforce without routing through legal, removing a persistent friction point for revenue-generating workflows. Qualitatively, the rollout shifted legal from a bottleneck to an enabler across multiple departments.

• NDA turnaround: 26 days → 2 minutes
• Volume: 3,000+ NDAs signed via Clickwrap
• Headcount justification: Insights data used to model future workload across multiple quarters, successfully supporting a case for additional legal staff

• Clickwrap is underused outside legal: High-volume, non-negotiable agreements across HR, procurement, and sales are strong candidates for one-click signing — not just legal-originated contracts.
• Data is a legal ops superpower: Contract analytics transforms legal from a cost center into a measurable business function — cycle time and workload data can directly support budget and headcount decisions.
• Incremental rollout beats big-bang deployments: Starting with a single pain point (NDAs) before expanding to other departments drives adoption and builds internal credibility for the CLM platform.
• Existing tool integrations accelerate value: Connecting CLM to Salesforce allows non-legal teams to self-serve, reducing bottlenecks without increasing legal team workload.