Stella Legal partners with Ironclad to make CLM a sustained service for in-house teams
Consultancy firm Stella Legal has announced a partnership with AI contracting platform Ironclad to help customers improve contract lifecycle management (CLM). The collaboration targets what Stella Legal calls "the critical gap between technology investment and business value realisation."
The pitch is simple: instead of treating CLM as a one-off tech project, handle it like an ongoing service. In-house teams can work with Stella Legal to redesign operating models, data flows, and processes around Ironclad-so value compounds rather than stalls after go-live.
Tyson Ballard, CEO and co-founder of Stella Legal, said: "By combining our expertise, we can help enterprise teams move beyond manual processes into a new era of agile, data-driven contracting."
Troy Wright, VP of worldwide partnerships and alliances at Ironclad, said the company is "continuing to innovate" for customers building an enterprise-grade AI contracting platform. He added: "We're excited to partner with Stella Legal to deliver value to our mid-market and enterprise customers across manufacturing, retail, finance, tech and pharmaceuticals."
Why this matters for in-house legal
- Shift from projects to products: treat CLM as a living service with roadmaps, backlogs, and defined ownership.
- Standardize at the source: tighten intake, templates, clause libraries, and playbooks to reduce variance.
- Make data a first-class citizen: design a contract data model and surface KPIs like cycle time, approval bottlenecks, and deviation rates.
- Automate the repeatable: trigger approvals, obligations, and renewals based on metadata, not inbox chasing.
- Integrate where work happens: connect CLM with CRM, procurement, and ERP to remove swivel-chair tasks.
- Build governance that lasts: clear roles, change control, and audit trails for policy, privacy, and risk.
- Invest in enablement: targeted training for legal, sales, procurement, and business approvers-not just the legal team.
- Close the feedback loop: measure adoption, fix friction points, and iterate quarterly.
Who's behind the partnership
Stella Legal was founded last year and has dual headquarters in London and Phoenix, Arizona. The founding team includes Tyson Ballard (CEO), senior director Alyssa Kokilah, general counsel Yolanda Van Wyk, and Gordon Williams, who leads client delivery. The quartet previously worked together at legal technology consultancy Syke, now part of technology solutions firm Consilio.
San Francisco-based Ironclad was formed in 2014 by lawyer Jason Boehmig, formerly a corporate attorney at Fenwick & West, and Cai Wangwilt, previously a software engineer at Palantir Technologies. In 2017, it raised $8m in Series A funding led by Accel.
Earlier this month, Stella Legal also entered into a delivery partnership with AI-native CLM platform Sirion.
What legal leaders can do next
- Run a quick current-state audit: intake paths, templates, approval rules, and data gaps.
- Select two or three high-volume use cases to standardize first (e.g., NDAs, order forms, vendor MSAs).
- Set baselines and targets: cycle time, touchpoints per contract, deviation rate, and post-signature obligation hits.
- Appoint a CLM product owner and a cross-functional council (Legal, Sales, Procurement, Finance, IT).
- Publish a 90-day roadmap and ship improvements in small, tested increments.
- Enable the business with short, role-specific training and in-app guidance.
If you're building skills around AI-driven contracting, document review, and automation, explore AI for Legal for practical resources that support CLM transformation.
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