How Elastic Cut NDA Turnaround by 87% Without Buying a CLM

Elastic's legal team had no reliable way to capture, track, or measure the requests coming into legal, and the contracts that did make it through were taking nearly a month to close.

Every legal team has a version of this story. Requests come in from every direction — a Slack message here, a Salesforce notification there, an email chain that somehow became the official record of a negotiation. And before long, the legal team is operating as a kind of institutional black hole: work goes in, and the business has no idea what's happening on the other side.

That was the reality at Elastic. The problem wasn't that the legal team wasn't working hard. It was that none of that work was visible. There were no reliable metrics on how many requests were coming in, what types they were, how long they were taking, or which ones were outliers that needed attention. Without that data, capacity planning was guesswork, and making the case for resources was nearly impossible.

Contracts made the problem concrete. Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) — the bread and butter of any tech company's commercial motion — were taking an average of 23 days to complete. However, this wasn’t because the legal review itself was slow. In fact, when the review finally happened, it was often pretty straightforward. The problem was everything that came before it: the back-and-forth over whose paper to use, the emails going unanswered, the negotiation about the negotiation. In many cases, up to 20 of those 23 days were consumed before anyone had even looked at the contract itself. Meanwhile, sales cycles stalled and deals waited.

"When we looked at the underlying data, we realized that sometimes it took up to 20 days just going back and forth deciding whose paper we were going to use. That sounds ridiculous, but it was happening."

Jen Lenander

Sr. Director & Chief of Staff at Elastic

The problem showed up at the other end of the deal cycle too. Resellers needed letters of authorization (LOAs) to close transactions — a document that confirmed they were an authorized Elastic partner and had passed the necessary compliance checks. The information to generate that letter already existed in Salesforce. But the process to actually produce it was entirely manual, and it took two days. At the end of a quarter, with deals on the line and the clock running down, two days was a long time to wait.

What Elastic needed wasn't just a faster process. They needed a fundamentally different one that could bring order to the front door of legal, give the business visibility into where things stood, and route the right work to the right place without requiring her team to touch everything that came in. The question was how to get there without asking the business to overhaul the way it worked.

Elastic deployed Checkbox as its legal front door and workflow engine, building a modular CLM stack alongside Ivo that replaced the need for a traditional, monolithic CLM platform.

When Jen sat down to figure out how to solve the intake problem, she didn't start with a vendor shortlist. She started with a framework.

Her thinking was straightforward: the contract lifecycle has three distinct jobs — intake, review, and repository. And in her experience, no single CLM platform did all three of them particularly well. The market had plenty of systems that promised end-to-end coverage, but in practice, teams ended up with a bloated tool that did many things adequately and nothing exceptionally. Jen wasn't interested in ‘adequately’. She wanted best-of-breed for each job, assembled into a stack that worked together without requiring a rip-and-replace of anything already in place.

That conviction led her to Checkbox for the intake and workflow layer.

"I have not seen a CLM tool that does all three of those parts really, really well, but I have seen intake tools that do it really well. I've seen review tools that do it really well, and I've seen repository tools that do it really well."

Jen Lenander

Sr. Director & Chief of Staff at Elastic

The logic was partly about capability and partly about change management. One of the biggest reasons legal tech rollouts fail is that they ask the business to change how it works to accommodate legal's tools. Jen was determined to avoid that trap. Elastic's sales team lived in Salesforce — that was where they managed accounts, tracked opportunities, and ran their entire commercial motion. By introducing Checkbox, that didn't change. Sales reps continued submitting contract requests directly from Salesforce, exactly as they always had. They didn't need to learn a new system, log into a new portal, or change a single step in their existing process. What changed was everything on the other side of that request. Checkbox captured it, generated the right document from a template based on the inputs provided, and routed it through an automated workflow that gave legal full visibility from the moment it landed. The business didn't feel the change, but the legal team felt it immediately.

The NDA workflow became the flagship use case. Rather than simply digitizing the old process, Elastic used Checkbox to restructure how counterparties engaged with the contract itself. When an NDA request came in, the counterparty received an email outlining four clear options:  

1. Sign Elastic's NDA as-is,

2. Make a selection of pre-approved changes from a defined list of acceptable variations,

3. Redline Elastic's paper, or

4. Submit their own.  

By giving counterparties the ability to self-select — and by making the first two options fast and frictionless — Elastic shifted the mix decisively toward first-party paper, without ever having to force the issue. The 20-day paper negotiation largely disappeared.

For contract review, Elastic brought in Ivo, an AI-native contract review platform. The integration required no engineering work. Documents generated by Checkbox workflows opened directly in Microsoft Word, with Ivo available in the right-hand panel, already trained on Elastic's playbooks and legal positions. Attorneys had everything they needed without switching systems, learning new tools, or changing the way they'd always worked. As Jen put it, the goal was always to meet users where they are — and for lawyers, that meant Word.

For LOAs, Checkbox connected directly to Elastic's existing Salesforce data to check whether the relevant due diligence and trade compliance steps had already been completed. If they had, the LOA was generated and dispatched automatically — no legal review, no manual steps, no waiting. The information was already there. Checkbox just put it to work.

Why Checkbox Over a Traditional CLM?

• Modular by design — Checkbox handled intake and workflow; Ivo handled AI-powered review. Each tool was chosen because it was the best at its specific job, not because it could loosely cover everything.

• Met users where they already were — Salesforce integration kept the sales team's motion completely unchanged, eliminating the change management burden that kills most legal tech rollouts.

• No-code flexibility — Jen's team could build, modify, and own workflows without waiting on IT or external consultants, giving legal real autonomy over its own processes.

• Fast time to value — Unlike traditional CLM implementations that routinely take 12 to 18 months to go live, Elastic was seeing results in weeks, not quarters.

• Built for more than contracts — The same platform powering NDA intake also handled certificates of insurance, DSARs, reseller agreements, and LOAs — one front door for every type of legal request across the business.

With Checkbox as its legal front door and workflow engine, Elastic transformed contract turnaround times, unblocked revenue at critical moments, and repositioned legal as a proactive partner to the business.

The results were immediate and measurable. NDAs that used to take 23 days now take three. The self-service workflow Elastic built in Checkbox — giving counterparties four structured options for how to engage with the contract — shifted the mix decisively toward first-party paper, and eliminated most of the back-and-forth before it could begin. Lawyers' time is now reserved for the reviews that genuinely need them.

The LOA transformation was just as striking. What had been a two-day manual process now takes only two minutes. Checkbox pulls the relevant compliance data directly from Salesforce, confirms the checks have been completed, and issues the document automatically.

"We were doing the work, but we didn’t have the data to show it. Checkbox gave us a centralized way to handle intake so we could finally see the volume and source of requests and plan resourcing accordingly.”

Jen Lenander

Sr. Director & Chief of Staff at Elastic

Legal went from being a potential blocker at the most critical moment of the sales cycle to being invisible in the best possible way — the deal just gets done.  

The impact has compounded beyond the legal team itself. When legal starts solving problems the business actually feels, the business notices. Other departments began asking the legal team whether Checkbox could solve their operational challenges too. Legal had built something that worked, and the rest of the organization wanted in.  

"It shows legal as a partner. We're not only solving legal problems, we're solving the sales ops problems as well."

Jen Lenander

Sr. Director & Chief of Staff at Elastic

Elastic is moving toward a fully agentic contracting model where low-risk contracts are reviewed, risk-scored, and routed for signature automatically, with human lawyers reserved for the work that genuinely requires them.

The foundation is already in place. Checkbox manages the intake and workflow layer. Ivo sits inside Word, trained on Elastic's playbooks, and knows exactly what Elastic is and isn't comfortable agreeing to. The next step is connecting those two layers in a way that closes the loop entirely.

Jen's vision for what that looks like is specific. A counterparty submits their own NDA paper. It enters the Checkbox workflow, gets routed to Ivo for AI-powered review, and receives a risk score. If the contract falls within Elastic's acceptable parameters, it moves directly to signature — no lawyer opens it, no one adds it to a review queue. Only the contracts that exceed the risk threshold surface for human attention.

"Why are our teams ever looking at an NDA? I don't know if we can articulate the value in that.”

Jen Lenander

Sr. Director & Chief of Staff at Elastic

The goal isn't to remove lawyers from the process. It's to make sure that when a lawyer does engage, it's because the situation genuinely calls for it. NDAs are the obvious starting point, but the principle extends further. Any workflow where the risk parameters are well-understood and the data is already there is a candidate for the same approach.

Beyond contracting, Elastic is continuing to expand Checkbox into new areas of the business such as DSARs, additional partner operations workflows, and further automation of compliance-adjacent processes that currently consume legal bandwidth without requiring meaningful legal judgment. Each new use case builds on the same foundation: a single front door for the business, with the right work going to the right place automatically.

For Elastic, the broader implication is structural. The legal operations team will need to grow to build and maintain these agentic systems — even as the volume of work that requires a practicing attorney begins to flatten. The legal ops function will become the team that owns the workflows, builds the automations, and ensures the system is doing what it's supposed to do. And Checkbox is the platform that makes that model viable.

What Does This Mean for Your Legal Team?

Elastic's story is proof that you don't need a monolithic CLM to get the full value of a CLM. You need a clear-eyed diagnosis of where the friction actually is and the right tools — assembled modularly — to address it.

If your legal team is sitting on a CLM that's underdelivering, or facing pressure to implement one before you're ready, Elastic's approach offers a practical and proven alternative:

• Start with intake — bring every request through a single front door before tackling anything else. Visibility is the foundation that everything else is built on.

• Build modularly — identify the best tool for each stage of the contract lifecycle rather than forcing one system to do everything.

• Meet users where they are — successful adoption means not asking the business to change how it works to accommodate legal's tools.

• Automate the low-risk work first — the workflows that save the most time are often the ones that require the least legal judgment. Start there, prove the value, and expand.

• Measure by outcome, not effort — NDA cycle time, deals unblocked, hours returned to strategic work. These are the metrics that resonate with leadership and prove legal's impact on the business.

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