Otto Hanson and the fine print everyone keeps paying to read

The contract was familiar. That was the problem. In his legal practice, Otto Hanson saw clients ask for reviews of click-through agreements from vendors such as AWS and Salesforce. Each customer needed to understand the bargain. Yet the vendor could be presenting essentially the same agreement to many of them. Somewhere in this arrangement, useful legal work was being performed again, and again, and again.

Hanson’s question was almost impolite in its simplicity: why couldn’t a neutral party review an agreement carefully once, then make that understanding available to everyone who needed it? A contract has enough clauses. It hardly needs a subscription to collective amnesia.

That question helps explain the route from TermScout, the contract intelligence company he co-founded, to Screens, the AI review business acquired by Agiloft, and now Astra, the product he leads there. The tools have changed. His recurring interest is the distance between expertise and the person trying to use it.

An entrepreneur learns the other side of the desk

Hanson arrived at law through business. He grew up in Arizona, worked in startups, and eventually decided that becoming a better entrepreneur required understanding the legal machinery around a company. Before his legal career, his management work took him through Boulder and Silicon Valley. It included three years selecting and managing outside counsel.

That experience gave him a customer’s view of the profession he would enter. Hiring legal help means making choices about cost, urgency, and what a business actually needs to know. Later, writing and reviewing agreements would let him see the same exchange from the other chair.

He earned an MBA at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies before attending Colorado Law, graduating in 2016. His professional biography also records an executive certificate in management and leadership from MIT Sloan in 2012. The sequence matters: business was already part of his working vocabulary when he began learning law.

At Colorado, he tried the investor’s chair too. Through the Deming Center Venture Fund, he helped assess startups and consider where student-managed capital should go. He also joined the Tech Lawyer Accelerator and took part in transactional competitions. His team won the national Transactional LawMeets competition in 2015.

The classroom and the startup eventually met in a pleasing reversal. In early 2019, Hanson returned to the Deming fund to pitch TermScout. The former student investor was now the person seeking investment. The fund backed the company. He had experienced both sides of due diligence, which is an unusually thorough way to prepare for awkward questions.

The weekend the question changed

In 2018, Hanson and fellow lawyer Katherine Snow joined developers Jeremy Church, Carlos Gochez, Chad Jolly, and Nathan Benes at the Global Legal Hackathon in Denver. Their project was called LexLucid. It addressed a familiar mismatch: online agreements could bind people who had little practical understanding of their contents.

The team initially imagined a browser extension. A reader would highlight a legal term and receive a plain-language explanation. It was a sensible answer to one problem: what does this clause mean?

During the event, they recognized another problem. Many readers were unlikely to work through the whole agreement, highlighting confusing passages as they went. An explanation tool still depended on a surprisingly diligent reader. The team shifted toward a summary and a fairness score, giving someone a way to assess the agreement more broadly.

It was a small product decision with a large implication. Making information available only helps if people can encounter it in a usable form. A person at a checkout screen is unlikely to welcome an extracurricular course in contract interpretation.

The competition left Hanson with more than a result for a biography. The team met its first investor at the final round. A prototype and financial interest supplied practical reasons to keep building. The idea developed into TermScout.

A market needs a measuring stick

At Davis Graham & Stubbs, Hanson worked on corporate and technology transactions. By 2020, he had left the firm to concentrate on TermScout. He described a five-person business where the chief executive’s responsibilities ranged from financing and recruiting to choosing a payroll provider. Three teammates were Colorado Law alumni, including Snow and Bill Mooz.

Mooz had been involved in Hanson’s early practical legal training. Their relationship later extended into investment, board work, and product development. Such connections give the company’s history a distinctly local character: people first encountered in a classroom kept reappearing around the business.

By May 2022, TermScout was announcing $5 million in seed funding, co-led by NFX and Ground Up Ventures. Its new Benchmark product compared IT agreements with negotiated and public contracts. The question had expanded from understanding an agreement to understanding where it stood in a market.

That distinction matters when two sides disagree over whether a term is normal. Without a point of comparison, each can deliver an impressively confident opinion. Comparative data gives the discussion something more concrete to work with. TermScout’s approach included human quality checks and anonymized, aggregated information shared through a data collective.

The company also offered certification badges that vendors could display. A review could become something a prospective customer encountered before starting a negotiation. This moved legal understanding closer to the commercial decision itself, where Hanson’s original question had begun.

Teaching the review to travel

Screens brought another form to the same pursuit. Built by Hanson and Evan Harris, it used expert-authored playbooks to review contracts against defined standards. A team could describe what it expected from an agreement, then use the software to assess the document and propose changes.

The approach made professional judgment more portable. A useful playbook captures decisions about what to accept, question, or change. Someone still has to make those decisions. Software creates a way to apply them across documents without beginning every review with an empty page.

Hanson has also preserved a place for individual advice. In discussing Screens in 2024, he described access to a qualified expert who can discuss a client’s questions and intentions as the preferred standard. The opportunity he pursued was the many transactions where that conversation was difficult to arrange or afford.

Trust required some work of its own. Screens let users inspect assessments beside the relevant contract language and flag incorrect decisions. Hanson encouraged customers to examine performance rather than simply accept the company’s accuracy claims.

“You don’t have to take our word for it.”

Otto Hanson, discussing Screens’ accuracy checks, 2024

There is a useful restraint in that invitation. A contract tool needs to help someone exercise judgment about the output. The review has consequences beyond the screen, and a neat answer is more useful when the reader can see how it relates to the actual words being signed.

The sale, and the work after it

On January 14, 2025, Agiloft announced its acquisition of Screens. Hanson and Harris were among six staff moving over. TermScout continued independently. The distinction is easy to miss in a career containing related companies, but it separates two different outcomes: one business joined a larger platform, while the other carried on under separate leadership.

Agiloft saw value in both the review technology and the community around shared playbooks. Its plans included offering Screens independently and integrating its capabilities into the wider contract management platform. For Hanson, joining meant working on the problem inside a company with established contracting infrastructure.

His own account of the decision emphasized colleagues. In a later public post, he described a crowded AI market and the attraction of Agiloft’s team. The choice joined a recurring theme in his career: a product decision was also a decision about whom to work with.

A shorter distance to understanding

In April 2026, Agiloft introduced Astra in early access, identifying Hanson as VP of Product and GM of Astra. The platform extended the work into contract analysis for legal, procurement, finance, and sales teams. It included a free tier, putting the question of access directly into the product’s commercial design.

General availability followed on July 14. The free plan included unlimited users and uncapped access to the Word Add-In. Those are product terms rather than a guarantee about anyone’s results, but they show how Hanson’s ambition has taken a specific, testable shape: let more people try the tool in the place they already work.

Alongside the software runs a quieter conviction. Hanson has long described community participation through the principle of giving first. He credits relationships formed around Colorado Law with helping him attract clients, raise money, and recruit. Generosity, in that account, is a working habit with consequences that arrive later.

His career offers several versions of the same return journey: the startup manager becomes a lawyer; the student investor returns with a pitch; the founder joins a larger product team. Each move supplies another view of the agreement on the desk. Through them all, the question remains pleasantly concrete. When the next person meets that contract, how much of the hard work can already be done?