DocuSign's Seal Software Acquisition Will Boost Contract Automation

LegalTech: DocuSign’s Seal Software Acquisition Will Boost AI’s Role in Contract Automation

Sudipto Ghosh

February 28, 2020

DocuSign is paying $188 million in cash to take next ‘bold steps’ in digitally transforming the current Contract Automation realm. The world’s leading Agreement Cloud maker is acquiring Seal Software. Seal Software is a pioneer in Contract Analytics and Discovery. Seal Software had announced an AI-Based Contract Negotiation Product – Seal Now™ in October 2019. DocuSign customers would benefit from the new combined forces of AI and Cloud in Contract Automation.

Seal-DocuSign: Tapping into the AI Market for Contract Automation

DocuSign and Seal Software have forged a solid relationship. The acquisition further welds its commitment to continuously innovate new technologies for the Cloud Contract Automation industry.

The news builds on the existing relationship between the two companies.

DocuSign already resells Seal’s flagship analytics and machine learning application as part of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud—its suite of applications and integrations for automating and connecting the entire agreement process. DocuSign also made a strategic investment in Seal in March last year.

With the acquisition, DocuSign can integrate Seal’s technology and value proposition more comprehensively across the Agreement Cloud—and therefore deliver greater value to companies looking to prepare, sign, act-on and manage the agreements that are critical to their business.

Founded in 2010, Seal is recognized as one of the pioneers in AI-driven contract analytics.

Its technology can rapidly search large collections of agreements by legal concepts (rather than just by keywords);
automatically extract and compare critical clauses and terms side-by-side; quickly identify areas of risk and opportunity; and
deliver actionable insights that help solve legal and business challenges.

DocuSign announces the DocuSign Agreement Cloud

Applying AI to Agreements

Built in part by DocuSign’s acquisition of technology from machine-learning startup Appuri in 2017, that foundation supports features like auto-tagging that are already offered today. These auto-tagging tools use AI to automatically detect where to put electronic tags on a document for signatures, dates, and other fields, This set of tasks previously required human effort and judgment.

Seal’s technology will add a new range of AI capabilities, driven by advanced natural language processing, text analytics, and semantic analytics.

“As the Agreement Cloud company, DocuSign is about digitally transforming the very foundation of doing business: agreements and agreement processes,” said Scott Olrich, DocuSign’s chief operating officer.

Scott added, “We believe that AI will play a vital role in this transformation. And by integrating Seal into DocuSign, we can benefit from its deep technology expertise and its broad experience applying AI to agreements.”

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John O’Melia, Seal’s CEO added that today’s news both validates and extends the company’s founding vision.

John added, “Seal was built to make finding, analyzing, and extracting data from contracts simpler and faster,” he said.

Seal’s CEO also said,

“We have a natural synergy with DocuSign, and our team is excited to leverage our AI expertise to help make the Agreement Cloud even smarter. Also, given the company’s scale and expansive vision, becoming part of DocuSign will provide great opportunities for our customers and partners.”

The Growing Scope of Legal Tech Applications in Emerging Markets

There are many instances of companies already realizing the benefits of leveraging Seal AI in their agreement processes today.

For example, one large international information-services company reduced the time spent on legal reviews by 75% thanks to DocuSign and Seal technologies. An international telecom company based in EMEA reduced the legal review time on customer agreements by more than 80%. A global financial services leader automated the analysis of over 2.6M contractual data points for critical supplier agreements. And a global aviation supplier reviewed over 25,000 agreements in just five business days as part of a corporate restructuring.

Once the acquisition has closed, DocuSign will continue to sell Seal’s analytics application. It will also integrate and leverage Seal’s AI technology to augment DocuSign CLM.

DocuSign CLM is one of the market’s leading contract lifecycle management solutions. This will help DocuSign CLM to automatically categorize clauses, extract their key terms, and then use that information to drive workflows. For example, automatically routing content to specific reviewers based on risk analysis and corporate policies.

For DocuSign customers, these capabilities will mean faster, more efficient agreement processes. Seal customers will, in turn, benefit from deeper access to the full capability of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud—especially document generation and advanced workflows.

Making AI Foundation of the Agreement Cloud Smarter

Beyond CLM, DocuSign expects Seal’s technology to make the AI foundation of the Agreement Cloud smarter too.

Under the terms of the agreement, DocuSign will acquire Seal for $188 million in cash (excluding the value of shares currently owned by DocuSign), subject to customary purchase price adjustments. The acquisition has been approved by the board of directors of DocuSign and Seal, and by the stockholders of Seal. Subject to customary closing conditions, including expiration of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of DocuSign’s fiscal year.

Seal will be featured at DocuSign’s annual customer, partner and developer conference, DocuSign Momentum, held on March 4th in San Francisco.