Oct 14, 2024

Summize is a company advancing true digital contracting with a CLM solution that prioritizes the user experience. It takes a different approach by embedding workflows directly into existing technologies that you already know and use daily, such as Outlook, Gmail, HubSpot, Teams, Slack, and Word. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Summize co-founder and CEO Tom Dunlop to learn more about the company. Tom Dunlop’s Background What is Tom Dunlop’s background? Dunlop said: “I’m Tom Dunlop, co-founder and CEO of Summize, a legal tech company with a new approach to how businesses manage contracts. I started Summize in 2018 with my co-founder, David Smith, after working as a technology and commercial lawyer and general counsel for several high-growth tech companies.” “Summize unites legal teams and business stakeholders with a self-service approach to contract lifecycle management (CLM), giving customers an AI-powered platform that natively integrates contract workflows with the most popular collaboration and software tools—Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce and Jira—that companies use daily.” Formation Of Summize How did the idea for Summize come together? Dunlop shared: “As a former general counsel and a practicing lawyer, I experienced contract problems first-hand. Contracts are getting more complex, creating a bottleneck for negotiation and signature. Legal teams are overwhelmed and inundated with manual and ongoing contract requests—on top of everything else they must support across a business.” “While other company departments were leveraging advanced tech and new AI workflows, legal teams weren’t evolving at the same pace. This led to an overreliance on manual processes and slower work, even though every aspect of the business was accelerating. We wanted to help legal teams digitize and automate their work using the latest AI tech. Lastly, we wanted to create a solution that would extend legal’s reach across a business in the most collaborative and user-friendly way possible.” “The key to success with CLM is to focus on the business-wide adoption of the solution, which requires a new way of thinking. This is why we started Summize, one of the fastest-growing CLMs on the market today.” Core Products What are Summize’s core products and features? Dunlop explained: “Summize is a Contract Lifecycle Management solution – but we describe ourselves as deliberately different, because we take a totally novel approach to solving the problem compared to the platform-based vendors. Summize removes friction and frustration for the business and provides huge time and efficiency gains for legal teams by bringing contract workflows directly into the everyday applications people use to do their work. Summize takes a “decentralized” approach to CLM by natively incorporating contract workflows into the most used software tools—Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce and Jira—so the user experience starts and ends within them.” “In-house legal teams set the clause playbooks, AI rulebooks and automated workflows, with business stakeholders in sales, procurement, finance, marketing and HR, performing the contract-related requests and tasks themselves via a self-service approach without introducing risk into the business.” “Key benefits from Summize include: — No lengthy change management or training processes for using the CLM or learning to work with the Summize AI; — A focus on end-user adoption and usability, providing improved collaboration with business users for ease of use and self-service; — AI-powered automations are built to enhance processes and make life easier for legal. Plus, it offers features customers love, like our Microsoft Word integration and granular search functionality; — Best-in-class natural language summaries of contract metadata with built-in reminders and tasks, and modern templates and playbooks help significantly mitigate risk; — Faster time-to-value with an expert implementation team working in 3-week sprints, and — Strong security features: SSO integration, IS027001, secure tokens, auto-patched infrastructure and more. Evolution Of Summize’s Technology How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Dunlop noted: “Summize actually started as a contract summary solution, so we became experts in solving that one specific use case first – and we still believe we offer best-in-class results for summarizing contractual documents today. From there, we expanded our capabilities to cover the end-to-end contract lifecycle, from the point a contract is requested, then negotiation and redlining, to when it is signed and stored. Our goal has always been to help everyone to understand each other better, and we do this by connecting legal with the rest of the business and creating the most intuitive, seamless experience within familiar tools.” “Summize launched the world’s first native Microsoft Teams and Slack integrations for CLM, followed by Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. We then expanded our solution to create a digital thread connecting other tools, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira and more, across a company’s tech stack. Summize is now a fully immersive, embedded AI contract experience that everyone can easily use and adopt.” Significant Milestones What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Dunlop cited: “Summize has grown 100% year over year in net ARR for the past four years. In 2024, we doubled our customer base, generating over 40% new revenue in the United States. We’re continuing our global expansion with our new U.S. headquarters in Boston and rapidly expanding our customer reach.” “We expanded our C-level team by hiring experienced senior executives early in the process, bringing together a leadership team with all with experience in scaling global tech companies. We’re also fortunate to have a strong board of directors that includes successful tech entrepreneurs Steve Kiln and Charles Sharland.” Customer Success Stories When asking Dunlop about customer success stories, he highlighted: “We work with some of the world’s best brands and fast-growing companies in financial services, sports and technology. For the legal team, Summize’s AI-powered summaries reduce the average time spent reviewing contracts by 85%, freeing in-house lawyers to focus on more strategic priorities and eliminating bottlenecks.” — Thought Machine’s banking software is transforming banking technology. With Summize, Thought Machine transformed its contract processes: the company’s volume of NDAs requiring legal input dropped from 80% to 10% by rolling out a Slack process for contract creation. “With Summize in place and our Slack integration for self-service contract creation, NDAs and trial agreements are being signed faster, which was a key objective for Thought Machine. Version control is easier, stakeholders are pleased with the new template and process, and the legal team has more time to spend on the more strategic work.” Kate Armstrong Senior Legal Counsel / Head of Legal Design and Operations at Thought Machine — Elior is one of the world’s leading contract catering and support services operators, with over 10,000 employees in North America and Europe. Elior completed 400+ contract reviews in five working days and experienced an 85% time reduction for contract completion reviews. — UserZoom is one of the leading operators in UI and UX services globally. Despite having a legal team of only two in-house general counsels, UserZoom reviewed 450 contracts in under 24 hours by using Summize, a feat that would take many months to complete manually. Future Company Goals What are some of the company’s future company goals? Dunlop pointed out: “It’s an exciting time for us right now. Fundamentally, it’s all about smart and meaningful growth. We are growing our team to support our customer expansion in both Manchester and Boston. From a technology perspective, we are constantly iterating and releasing updates that will benefit our customers. We have some exciting roadmap items coming down the line – watch this space!” Differentiation From The Competition What differentiates the company from its competition? Dunlop concluded: “For a CLM integration to be useful, it must first be used. Platform-based CLM solutions have one common problem: Despite contracts being integral to multiple departments, they are primarily designed with legal teams in mind and remain separate from the organization’s existing ecosystem, which means user adoption is a common challenge. 77% of CLM implementations fail to deliver their intended outcomes, mainly because they are considered a legal tool rather than a business-wide solution.” “Summize is instead focused on meeting the end-user in the applications they use daily to ensure the business-wide adoption of its solution. Summize natively integrates our AI and automation workflows directly into existing tools. For example, lawyers love working in Microsoft Word, so we meet them where they are instead of asking them to learn an entirely new solution and then force the rest of the business stakeholders to use it, too. This approach maximizes adoption and ensures data points are tracked and connected, regardless of the user interface.” “In addition, as a team of software entrepreneurs with many lawyers on our team, we know how in-house legal departments work and collaborate closely with our customers to ensure our approach to automation and AI is deployable and adaptable. Legal teams don’t need to spend months building legal playbooks for the AI to learn from – we’ve distilled our approach down to ensure legal teams can have a fast ramp-up.” Pulse 2.0 focuses on business news, profiles, and deal flow coverage.