I am trying to make Entities work for us but it's a bit tricky.
Basically it appears there are some default Relationship properties that must be filled out: e.g. "Business Type". Our existing workflows already have a much better dropdown property for this "Legal Form", which lists all the UK entity types.
Currently, Ironclad does not allow us to:
- Delete the useless Business Type field.
- Add a drop-down type property for use with Entities. It's all FREE TEXT! As we all know, a vital part our jobs is guarding against "Put s**t in, get s**t out", so giving the business free text boxes for key metadata is just crazy. There is also no available help text for them to even select from (and they wouldn't read it anyway). Drop downs and multiple choice are the only way to guardrail against this.
On this basis, Entities is pretty much useless for us right now, which is a real shame. It's an example of a software release which could be amazing but there is some sort of unnecessary flaw that makes it unusable. This is also how I feel about Smart Import - could have been amazing but the workflow is painstaking and it's just not good enough at detecting the correct clauses (which in 2025 and a partnership with OpenAI is quite baffling to be honest), or the whole clause, or allowing you to free select the appropriate clause. Same deal for AI Playbooks - clunky to implement, not accurate - I am not sure it is worth our time to implement given where AI now is.
I feel like Ironclad quite often releases great new features on paper without seemingly having checked what users most want. There are ideas on this forum that have never been implemented that people have been asking for since 2021.
I apologise this has descended into a moan. I am a huge advocate for Ironclad, which we've had since 2021, but I feel the CLM needs more focus and user feedback and existing users need more guidance as to how to best use the product offerings. It does feel like Ironclad is almost at the stage where you can't use it to its full extent unless you have a dedicated legal ops team updating it constantly.
Finally, the new dashboard Repository remains inferior, the record layout is confusing and I need to hook up Legora to analyse my contracts. It shouldn't be that way.
