Consider a freight agreement with a fuel surcharge. The lawyers can describe exactly how that surcharge should change each week. The parties can sign electronically. The file can arrive, immaculate and searchable, in a digital folder. Yet somebody still has to look up the fuel price, perform the calculation and move the answer into a payment system. The contract has reached its destination. Its instructions are waiting for a lift.
- Clause connected legal terms to live data and business software.
- Its examples included fuel-price calculations, weather-linked insurance and supplier checks.
- DocuSign invested in 2019, then acquired the IP and hired the team in 2021.
01 / The document gets to work
Clause occupied that awkward space between an agreement and its execution. Its cloud platform let businesses attach programmable Smart Clauses to legal documents. Incoming data could prompt a calculation, a notification or a payment workflow. The prose remained part of the agreement; selected obligations acquired a software counterpart. Think of a document with a modest second career in operations.
The fuel example was real. In its 2019 review, Clause described BakerHostetler’s work connecting freight agreements to public fuel-price data and payment systems for weekly adjustments. This was an unusually legible answer to the question of what a smart legal contract was good for. A formula already existed. The information needed to run it already existed. Clause supplied the connection.
For legal, procurement and finance teams, the attraction was less retyping and fewer opportunities for agreed terms to disappear between departments. Clause’s expertise lay in the translation: identifying which parts of a commercial promise could become structured data and executable rules, then making those rules communicate with enterprise software.
02 / A cloudy day becomes an input
A project with Clyde & Co’s Clyde Code consultancy made the idea more vivid. A solar producer’s insurance agreement could receive weather data, calculate potential claims and produce a claims file. But the policy’s mechanics included qualifications: named storms could exclude payments, and consecutive-day, total-day and policy limits constrained them. The interesting engineering was in those exceptions.
It is easy to say a contract should respond to the weather. It is harder to specify which weather, where, for how long, and with what exclusions. Clause’s approach placed those operational details beside the legal text. The result was useful precisely because it preserved the fussiness that makes an agreement an agreement.
The same principle applied before signing. Clause Verify could compare supplier information with systems of record, including exclusion lists, and prevent approval or signature until checks passed. Periodic checks could continue afterwards. For a healthcare procurement team, that meant the onboarding document could participate in verification instead of merely collecting answers.
Service agreements offered another practical entry point. Clause and Elevate described a ServiceNow example in which performance data could determine customer credits or vendor earnings. The appeal was to the people administering the relationship: a missed target could become a calculated amount, rather than another task waiting for someone to compare two screens.
03 / Lawyers, engineers and a common language
In a 2016 interview, original co-founders Peter Hunn and Houman Shadab brought recognizably legal backgrounds to the problem. Hunn had studied law in Britain and worked in private equity; Shadab was a former law-firm attorney and financial-law professor. They wanted agreements connected to the physical world, where conditions change without asking permission from the filing cabinet.
Clause helped establish Accord Project in 2017. Its open-source tools supplied a common foundation for smart legal contracts; the project joined the Linux Foundation in 2019. This mattered commercially as well as technically. A business asking others to encode agreements benefits from having a shared format that others can inspect and implement.
“It feels like the e-signature moment for contracts all over again.”
Peter Hunn, in a 2019 interview
Blockchain was one possible connection. In Clause’s IBM Blockchain sample, Hyperledger Fabric stored network state while contract logic ran off-chain through Accord Project’s Cicero engine on Clause. That architectural detail helps locate the company in the market: its proposition was operational legal agreements connected to data, with blockchain available when the workflow called for it.
04 / Even automation had a meter
Clause’s commercial platform left beta in April 2019. Contemporary pricing coverage listed $10 per user per month, $5 per contract per month and $0.50 per update, with optional support at $100 or $500 monthly. These were historical rates. The bill reflected the product: people using it, agreements running on it and changes passing through it.
April 2019 historical pricing · optional support extra
Its position overlapped with contract lifecycle management, but the distinctive work happened where terms met transactions. Fifth9’s Price Manager paired Clause technology with implementation services to compare invoices against contractual terms and flag discrepancies. A repository can help you find an agreement. This kind of connection helps you notice that somebody has billed you differently.
That distinction also explains the practical burden. As an inference from the design, automation works best where obligations are measurable and data feeds dependable. An ambiguous standard or a disputed reading still needs judgment. A sensible first experiment is one repeated calculation with an agreed input and an explicit exception path. Automating a vague promise only gives the vagueness a faster vehicle.
05 / The future needed somewhere to live
In June 2019, Clause raised a $5.5 million Series A led by Galaxy Digital, with DocuSign participating. The signing company was already a partner. The relationship became an acquisition of IP rights and a hiring of the team; DocuSign confirmed closure on June 1, 2021. Most of the team was headed for platform engineering.
The transaction also had a less polished backstory. In his 2025 retrospective, CTO Dan Selman recalled struggling to keep Clause afloat in early 2021 and increasingly seeing acquisition as the best outcome for the team. He later described the engineers’ influence on DocuSign’s structured-data foundations. The idea continued inside a larger business.
Clause leaves a useful question for anyone buying business software: after your system records the promise, what carries it out? The answer may be a person, a spreadsheet or a reliable connection between systems. Clause tried to make that connection part of the agreement itself. A contract could finally do a little of the work it had assigned to everyone else.