BlackBoiler, an automated contract markup technology provider, today announced it has secured $3.2 million in funding from strategic investors, including agreement cloud company DocuSign. BlackBoiler plans to use the funds to further develop its patented software capabilities and accelerate team growth.
Dan Broderick, BlackBoiler’s CEO and founder, and his team must be congratulated for this significant new funding. But after recently talking to Dan and Verun Mehta, CEO of Factor (see my recent post), I’m beginning to wonder whether this lasting legal disruption brought about by Covid that everyone keeps talking about is really happening.
Blackboiler is an innovative high volume contract review tool that uses artificial intelligence and human interfaces to create, edit, and negotiate similar contracts more efficiently and better. With offices in Washington D.C. and New York City, BlackBoiler is a National Science Foundation-backed software company focused on contract review automation.
I caught up with BlackBoiler’s founder, Dan Broderick, recently, and asked him what BlackBoiler planned to do with the funding. Dan is an interesting guy. He practiced at Thompson Hine and Kilpatrick Townsend and Stockton and while toiling away in the ranks as an associate negotiating and preparing repetitive contracts. Like so many in the legal tech world, he had an idea that would make his job easier (and, of course, reduce billable hours, which isn’t exactly the path to partnership at many firms).
Dan concluded that trying to read through every word of a contract to determine where standard language might be called for, find the right clause(s) and make sure the language was applied correctly in the specific context—is inefficient and error-prone. Not to mention the time haggling with the other side over mostly irrelevant terms similar to those that appear in