Do One Thing Right

For law firm leaders, the lesson of Ironclad is to identify our strengths, and then lean into them.

Ironclad CEO Jason Boehmig (courtesy photo)

“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”

If Justin Timberlake is to be believed, contract management software behemoth Ironclad just got very cool, indeed. Ironclad recently closed $100 million in Series D funding off a valuation just shy of $1 billion, making it the tech world’s latest unicorn.

“Cool” isn’t part of the conversation Ironclad co-founder and CEO Jason Boehmig usually hears around his company. “We’ve been described in the press as boring, unsexy, all those words,” he told me during an interview last week. “But I think the people who really understand what we’re doing [see] there’s also kind of a revolutionary implication for what we’re doing.” Beyond that, Ironclad’s success also contains lessons that everyone in law — from law firm management to newly minted associates — can draw from.

Setting The Standard

Boehmig makes it all sound so simple: Ironclad wants to do for contracts what the shipping container did for cargo. As Boehmig retells it, the history of shipping cargo by boat is primarily marked by one innovation: containerization. For millennia, products were put on ships in containers of all sizes, with little to nothing in the way of agreed-upon standards for shipping sizes, package tracking, or other aspects of the industry we now consider essential. Packages spent months at sea without word of whether they were actually making their way to shore, cargo was routinely lost, and the loading and unloading of boats took more time than the actual hauling of the cargo across the ocean.

Then World War II hit, and lost containers of ammunition and supplies were no longer acceptable. The shipping industry settled on standards for shipping containers and package tracking, which we today call containerization. With that, the shipping industry seemingly grew up overnight. While your grandparents might have ordered a package, crossed their fingers, and hoped it would arrive sometime in the next six months, today we can order nearly anything we can think of online and trust it will generally arrive safely, securely, and quickly.

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Boehmig sees the same opportunity in the world of contracting. The contract is the basic unit of much of the business world. Our companies can move only as fast as we can enter into agreements with new vendors and customers. Yet most companies’ contract processes remain drastically slow, with each contract going through endless tailoring processes and requiring the signoff from more stakeholders than is practicable. Ironclad aims to fix this problem.

The Disciplined Pursuit Of Less

What’s maybe the most revolutionary thing about Boehmig’s strategy is that he wants to fix only that problem. Part of Ironclad’s success comes down to Boehmig’s laser-focus on contract management and resistance to feature creep and vision bloat. When I first spoke with Boehmig at the end of 2019, Ironclad was exclusively a contract management solution. When I asked him last week about the areas Ironclad will expand into with its latest $100 million round of financing, he said simply, “We’ll stick with contracts.” Boehmig sees contracts as an unfathomably huge and largely untapped market segment, one with more than enough room to grow in for the time being. “We really want to be the place that people make business contracts,” and despite being an industry leader, Boehmig characterizes Ironclad as only “1% of the way there.”

Rather than build out ancillary structures from scratch, Ironclad has leaned heavily into partnerships with other top-of-the-market providers. “I always approached the company in favor of only doing the things that we think we can do at a first-class level,” he said, using DocuSign as an example: “DocuSign is fantastic at e-signature, they’ve built an incredible e-signature product. We said, ‘that’s a first-class product. We are gonna integrate around that.’” By focusing on building a strong core product that integrates well elsewhere, Ironclad has avoided reinventing the wheel and dedicated its resources to higher-return areas of development.

Ironclad’s strategy brought to mind Stanford MBA grad Greg McKeown’s 2014 book “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.” McKeown argues that less often turns out to be more. By identifying what is actually important in our lives and our businesses and giving those our absolute priority and attention, we both maximize the impact of our achievements and positively reframe our internal metrics for success.

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For law firm leaders, the lesson of Ironclad is to identify our strengths, and then lean into them. Rather than diluting a firm’s resources by trying to be all things to all potential customers, firm managers can focus on developing the practices that make their firm unique and show the firm off in its best light. By focusing on what we do best, we shed distractions and set ourselves up for the strongest success we’re able to muster.

The Long Haul

I asked Boehmig if he had any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and his response seemed to work equally well for young attorneys setting out to build their practices: “Pick an area that you want to work on for a decade-plus and that you’re going to get excited about. You’re going to talk so much about what you work on since it’s such a big part of your life. One mistake I see budding entrepreneurs make is they feel like they found a clever hack in a process, and they get caught up in considering the incremental improvement that could make. They don’t necessarily consider ‘Do I actually want to spend a decade working on this problem?’”

Instead, Boehmig argues, pick a problem you can commit a decade to, commit, and see what happens. “By any means necessary, keep moving, putting one foot in front of the other. Big companies don’t care as much as you, and that’s really your only advantage as an entrepreneur — that you care more. As long as we keep caring more and asking the right questions, and wanting to spend more time with our customers, we’ll win.”

I couldn’t agree with this advice more, especially to young attorneys trying to find their professional feet. Many attorneys I’ve known stumbled into a practice through happenstance, or inertia, or sometimes just dumb luck. I’ve known attorneys that’s worked well for, but what are the odds that what we stumbled into is what we actually enjoy? The attorneys I know who have both the most financial success and the most personal satisfaction are the ones who walk into the office every day knowing they’re doing what they want to do. Clients know when you actually care about your work, and that passion will show up in both your work product and your bottom line. Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day for the rest of your life.

Now that’s cool.


James Goodnow is the CEO and managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. At age 36, he became the youngest known chief executive of a large law firm in the U.S. He holds his JD from Harvard Law School and dual business management certificates from MIT. He’s currently attending the Cambridge University Judge Business School (U.K.), where he’s working toward a master’s degree in entrepreneurship. James is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.