NEXT Insurance's legal operations manager says Ironclad's Contract Review Agent halves termination-letter drafting time

NEXT Insurance’s legal team lacked a standardized contract review and management process. Employees often signed contracts or agreed to terms without legal review, creating visibility gaps and compliance risk. Ironclad had been purchased but was inconsistently implemented, with some teams still routing contracts by email and no dedicated legal operations owner to drive end-to-end adoption.

After hiring a Legal Operations Manager, NEXT inventoried its contract types, built playbooks for each and trained AI-powered clauses, using a phased 30-60-90 day approach with stakeholder engagement. Within 9-13 months of her joining, Legal set a firm rule: it would not review any contract unless it went through Ironclad. Attorneys were given access to Ironclad's AI assistant, Contract Review Agent, which includes a prompt library, and Ironclad's AI Playbooks were used to enforce a policy against auto-renewal clauses in vendor contracts.

Mandating Ironclad reduced the compliance risk of employees signing contracts without legal review and supports SOX audit requirements through approvals, reminders and auto-renewal tracking. The legal operations manager says drafting a termination letter with Contract Review Agent "cuts my time in half". Ironclad's page is headed "NEXT Insurance Gives Legal Operations 50% of Its Time Back", but it gives no other time measurement. It reports 100% user adoption in a single week, 9 messages per user per week and 20 uses of the prompt library in one week. The legal team reports better visibility across the team than under the prior siloed review process.

• • Make CLM the only path for legal review to force adoption and close visibility gaps.
• • Pair playbooks and policy rules (e.g., no auto-renewals) with AI assistants so review stays consistent under lean headcount.
• • Treat AI as assistive—“trust but verify”—while using usage metrics to demonstrate legal’s operational impact.