Contracts Platform Parley Pro Names New CEO – And She’s An ATL Columnist

Olga V. Mack’s goal as CEO is to drive a shift in thinking about contracts and the role of technology in transforming the legal industry.

The contract management platform Parley Pro has a new chief executive officer as of today, and she is none other than Above the Law columnist Olga V. Mack, a lawyer with extensive experience as a corporate general counsel, corporate board director, and women’s advocate.

Mack has been named president, chief executive officer, and chairperson of the board of directors of Parley Pro. Cofounder Lilian Caldeira, who has been the company’s CEO, is moving into the role of chief product officer and will continue to serve on the board. The company’s other founder, Roman Kisin, remains in his position as chief technology officer.

Founded in 2014, Parley Pro is a web-based contract negotiation and management platform for use by corporate and enterprise customers. It provides tools to create, negotiate, manage, automate, and optimize contracts.

“Parley Pro has taken a leadership position in the contract lifecycle management market as the only real-time and truly collaborative product,” Caldeira said in a statement. “We have experienced tremendous success, growing over 300 percent in the last year alone, and Olga is the perfect person to take the helm and lead our company into its next phase.”

Mack most recently worked as vice president of strategy at Quantstamp, a company that provides security audits for blockchain-based smart contracts. She was previously general counsel at the sales and marketing technology company ClearSlide, assistant GC at dating app Zoosk, and in-house counsel at Visa. She started her legal career as an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, after graduating from the University of California Berkeley School of Law in 2006.

In addition to writing a weekly column at Above the Law, Mack is a corporate social responsibility fellow at Berkeley Law and a CodeX fellow at Stanford University.

Mack is founder of Women Serve on Boards, which advocates for women to serve on the corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies, and was successful in persuading over a dozen Fortune 500 companies to recruit their first woman director. She advocated, testified, and mobilized for the passage of California SB 826, which requires public companies to recruit women directors. She also wrote, Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat, published this year by Business Expert Press.

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Thinking Differently About Contracts

In an interview Friday, Mack told me that she was attracted to the company by what she sees as its innovative approach to the contracts process.

“What I love about the product is that, at a high level, instead of simply digitizing the existing contracts process, they are really asking what the process should be and how the tools and technology we have can enable us to practice law better,” she said.

Her goal as CEO, she said, is to drive a shift in thinking about contracts and the role of technology in transforming the legal industry. “I want lawyers to be more satisfied,” she said. “Technology has the potential to allow us to have more meaningful jobs and better relations with our clients.”

That shift in thinking has three components, Mack said:

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  1. We have to stop thinking about contracts as just pieces of paper. Rather, they are multi-dimensional digital assets, she says, that have histories behind them and associations with other documents, people and organizations. “We need to shift from the idea that we’re creating documents to the view that we are creating digital assets.”
  2. We need to be sober about the fact that contracts is a team sport. While the legal department is an important guardian in the process, other stakeholders also have relationships with these digital assets throughout their lifecycles. Those relationships also must be managed and lawyers have to have the tools to manage them.
  3. Once you accept that contracts are digital assets, then you need to have the tools to measure their success and performance, so you can optimize their usefulness. You need a tool that lets you zoom in and zoom out to get a complete view of these assets.

Given these goals, I asked Mack if she is satisfied with the Parley Pro product as it stands today. She is, she said, but she also recognizes that it needs to continue to evolve.

“We need to provide the value we can today, but it is also prudent for us to build with an eye to the future and what’s coming.”

Having just left a blockchain company, she has a good appreciation of what is coming, she said. Expect to see more developments involving artificial intelligence, smart contracts, and blockchain.

The market is hot right now for applications related to the review and management of contracts. Last week, I wrote a post charting investments in legal technology, and discovered that, of the 41 major deals in 2019 so far, more than a quarter involve technology related to contracts. I asked Mack how she plans to compete in such a crowded market.

As a former IP lawyer, Mack answered, she learned that companies do not want to be on islands by themselves, because it indicates the product probably won’t be profitable.

“I love that this is a crowded field,” she said. “That’s an indication that the opportunity is massive. In every organization, there will be lots of contracts. The opportunity to help people deal with contracts and documents is quite large. You will absolutely need different companies in this market.”

She also believes that a number of the competitors in the market are legacy companies with “dinosaur” products.

“Not all players will continue to thrive,” she said. “I only like to solve problems that have a huge impact.”


Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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