Steve Tucker, who was with Seal Software when the AI company was bought by tech giant DocuSign, has left to join Evisort as Chief Sales Officer, as the battle for CLM market share continues to heat up.
This site doesn’t often do staff moves, but this one seems significant primarily because CLM is so hot and competitive right now. With a lot of investment going in and with huge pressure to make sales in order to drive the expected – and much needed – revenue growth, moves of top sales people can make a difference.
Moreover, DocuSign is building out its own CLM capability, especially since it bought Spring CM, and has used Seal’s legacy tech to help with NLP needs. Tucker was Vice President – Enterprise Sales at DocuSign, so this is a senior move.
Meanwhile, Evisort is a rival US-based CLM company, also with a strong focus on the use of NLP to rapidly extract contract data.
Tucker (pictured), who is British, but based in California, told Artificial Lawyer that he had a background in procurement before he joined Seal in 2010, and now after two years at DocuSign it was time for a new challenge.
‘I’ve really seen the early days of leveraging AI for contracts,’ he noted, then added that things have gone up a gear and the battle for market share among NLP-driven CLM companies was at a new level.
‘The fascinating thing is that CLM – even now, after 30 years – is still at an early stage. What is different now is that the tech has caught up with the promises of CLM,’ he said. ‘This is CLM 3.0 now.’
He explained that the problem with CLM in the past was that it just could not efficiently do what was needed. NLP tech was not that well developed, nor the entire information infrastructure for using that data effectively. Now, the tech has come of age and there is a big battle over clients.
‘The addressable market is enormous, but fragmented. The incredible thing is that there are no market leaders, no-one has even 10% of the CLM market,’ he added.
His said that he believes very strongly that Evisort will become a market leader – among a small handful of others – and that is why he wanted to make the move.
In terms of clients, Tucker said that Evisort seeks to work with both small, large, and giant companies.
‘There is no doubt in my mind that I am joining the winner in this market over the long-term. I genuinely believe that,’ he concluded.
Of course, ContractPodAi, Agiloft, Ironclad and many others, including DocuSign, would no doubt also say they will be long-term CLM winners. Looks like the battle is on…!