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Recently, legaltech commentator Zach Abramowitz posed a provocative question: “Has CLM reached product market fit?” Product/market fit is, roughly, whether a product meets strong market demand, but the definition is pretty squishy and inexact1 . Since the definition of product/market fit (aka “PMF”) is squishy, Abramowitz considers a bunch of indicators. “how total number of users would increase if marketing were to slow down. Is the number of users growing organically or is traction simply a product of marketing?”

Are your contracts doing enough to protect your company from unforeseen circumstances like inflation? In January 2022 the U.S. inflation rate climbed to its highest level in 40 years1 , with prices rising by 7.5% from a year ago. It has had a significant impact on many, including the companies (both buyers and vendors) that have been trying to survive the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation brings risk and uncertainty along with it, and it might be doing more harm to your business than you’re aware of.

Tl;dr: Building contract AI yourself is costly. More problematically, it’s hard to get the tech right. You risk spending a significant amount of time and effort and still ending up with a solution (that you have to maintain) which isn’t as good as what competitors have through licensing tech. As the leader of a software vendor, you (and your teams) are constantly making buy/build decisions. I’ve been there. Over a decade, I was CEO of Kira Systems as we grew from two people to over 200, building a dominant position in our main market.

Over the last stretch, Google has been getting lots of attention for their Contract DocAI (a/k/a Google Contract Document AI) product. Since Zuva API product also enables software developers to embed pre-built contract analysis artificial intelligence into their applications via an API, I’ve been asked how I feel about having Google Contract DocAI as a competitor. Here’s a legaltech friend’s note: Was just thinking about you this week while investigating Google’s new DocAI tool Ironclad is using. If we were getting beers I would ask your thoughts on how this will impact the market. Since beers may be a long time away, dropping it in here.