A contract can arrange any number of things: a delivery, a payment, an apology expressed in money. Then everyone signs it, files it, and goes back to doing the work of remembering what it said. Peter Hunn built a company around that peculiar division of labour. The document contained the instructions. People still had to carry them out.
His question was practical, even if the answer sounded unfamiliar to lawyers in 2016. Could an agreement receive information about the world and do something useful with it? Could the terms governing a shipment respond to its arrival? Could a promised service credit become a calculation, rather than an afternoon spent reconciling records?
Clause, the company he co-founded and led, pursued those questions. Docusign acquired its intellectual property and brought its team inside in June 2021. Alongside the business, Hunn founded the Accord Project, an open-source effort to give computable agreements a common foundation. One venture had customers and investors. The other invited people to build on shared tools. Both concerned the working life of a promise.
The lawyer who kept looking past the signature
Hunn studied law at Cambridge and commercial law at Bristol, receiving a distinction at Bristol. Before Clause, his experience included private equity and work with startups backed by accelerator programmes. He arrived at the problem with a lawyer's vocabulary and an interest in what technology could change about everyday commercial work.
His original co-founder, Houman Shadab, brought experience as a law-firm attorney and professor of financial law. In a November 2016 interview, the pair described contracts that could connect to changing conditions through data feeds, sensors and other systems. Their examples included adjusting payments when delivered parts failed agreed quality standards. These were proposed applications, with the obligations still belonging to the people who made the agreement.
The attraction is easy to understand. Two businesses may agree on a precise formula and still employ someone to apply it repeatedly. The contract can be beautifully drafted while its administration remains a small cottage industry. Hunn was asking whether some of that recurring work could be designed into the agreement itself.
In a 2017 essay, he called the underlying architecture a “contract stack.” His example was an order for a thousand widgets. A signed document captured the purchase, but businesses also needed to know whether the goods had arrived, whether quantities matched, and what that meant for payments and other commitments. The interesting events mostly occurred after the ink had dried.
A shared grammar for commercial promises
A company could build its own system for this. Getting agreements to travel between companies was another matter. If each product described a payment, party or delivery differently, exchanging the resulting information would become a translation job. Software has a remarkable capacity to recreate the paperwork it was hired to remove.
The Accord Project, founded in 2017, addressed the common foundation. In June 2019 it became a Linux Foundation project. Its approach brought together natural-language contract text, a data model and executable logic. The words remained readable; the data and rules gave software something precise to work with.
That architecture allowed different kinds of expertise to meet. Lawyers could work on what the agreement meant. Developers could work on its representation and execution. A shared template gave both sides a concrete object to discuss, test and revise. The project also made its code and documentation available for others to use and contribute to.
The choice of infrastructure mattered. Accord's approach did not require a particular vendor or a particular blockchain. An agreement could use a distributed ledger where appropriate, or connect with conventional business systems. For Hunn's wider project, that kept attention on the agreement and its behaviour, rather than making one technology a condition of entry.
By the summer of 2019, the work had a public gathering place too. The Accord Project Forum in London brought together legal, technology and industry participants, with a keynote by Lord Keen. Building a common format meant convening people who did not necessarily use the same professional language. Someone had to get them into the same room.
“It feels like the e-signature moment for contracts all over again.”
Peter Hunn, July 2019
The partner on the other side of the table
In 2019, Clause raised a $5.5 million Series A with investors including Docusign, Galaxy Digital and Seedcamp. Hunn described the money as a way to expand engineering and customer-facing teams. Docusign's participation also made the relationship unusually concrete: a company associated with getting agreements signed was backing technology concerned with what agreements could subsequently do.
Hunn sounded encouraged by the shift in conversation. Three years earlier, he said, mentioning smart contracts in legal circles could produce puzzled looks. By 2019, the subject was appearing throughout the conference circuit. Interest brought its own demands: integrations to build, customers to help, and interfaces that had to make an unfamiliar idea usable.
Asked where Clause went next, he offered a compact answer: “We keep going.” It was a useful sentence for a founder whose product depended on changing habits as well as shipping software. A demonstration could show a contract responding to an event. Adoption required people to trust the arrangement enough to put it into their working day.
Docusign announced the planned transaction on May 27, 2021, and confirmed its closure on June 1. The deal covered Clause's intellectual property rights and the hiring of its team. Most of that team would join platform engineering. The technology already integrated with Docusign eSignature, giving the two companies a working relationship to build upon.
The examples accompanying the deal were refreshingly ordinary: checking bank details before signature, monitoring a service commitment, sending a notification when a condition was met. There is something appealing about ambitious software earning its keep by catching an incorrect account number. Commerce has plenty of room for useful improvements that will never require a launch party.
The work of making the data agree
Shortly before that transaction, Hunn had launched Legal Schema, supported through the Lawtech Sandbox. Its concern was the structure of contract data: how information could be described consistently enough to be exchanged, searched and used across systems. Even a document that never executed a payment could benefit from that consistency.
The project exposed a quieter part of his thinking. Extracting information from an existing document is one approach. Giving the document a structured representation from the beginning is another. Names, dates and obligations become more useful to software when their meaning does not have to be rediscovered each time a new application encounters them.
That makes Hunn's career legible as a series of related problems. Clause dealt with actions attached to agreements. Accord supplied shared tools. Legal Schema concerned common descriptions of the information inside documents. Each required decisions about meaning before automation could reliably get to work. The glamorous part of a smart contract rests on some rather meticulous housekeeping.
There is a human consequence to this apparently technical concern. When two people read an agreement, they can ask each other what a term means. A connected system needs a representation it can process. Choosing that representation is part of designing the agreement, with consequences for what can be checked and what still requires a person’s attention. Hunn’s focus on structure brings that decision closer to the beginning of the process.
A book, and the questions code leaves open
In April 2022, Oxford University Press published Smart Legal Contracts: Computable Law in Theory and Practice, edited by Jason Allen and Hunn. The volume considered the relationship between legal agreements and their computational expression across technical and legal perspectives. Editing a collection meant creating space for questions that a product demonstration could only begin to raise.
His work has also extended to the Law Commission of England and Wales, on smart contracts, digital assets and decentralised autonomous organisations. He has served on the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce, and Singapore Management University's Centre for Digital Law identifies him as a Stanford CodeX Fellow. The company-building sits beside work on how legal institutions understand these technologies.
Docusign's public biography describes his role as Senior Director of Smart Agreements, focused on innovation, strategy and implementation. The recurring subject is still recognisable: how agreements become usable parts of a digital business. The scale and setting changed after Clause; the basic question survived the acquisition.
There were people behind the plumbing
Dan Selman, Clause's co-founder and CTO, supplied a colleague's view in a February 2025 reflection. He remembered Hunn's many flights and meetings to raise money and interest in Clause and Accord. He also credited Hunn with teaching him about the similarities and differences between law and software. The founder's work included being a translator between disciplines.
Selman recalled an early product that was still rough in January 2018, followed by repeated improvements and public demonstrations. Looking back from Docusign in 2025, he described the former Clause team as contributing to the company's agreement platform and its use of structured data. The story continued through engineers, designers and product people whose work outlasted the startup's independence.
Hunn's own account of life away from work is modest: reading, writing, learning, collecting wine and spending time with his daughter. He also describes supporting startups as a passion, listing investments in companies and funds including AtoB, Atoms and Chapter One. There are interests here beyond teaching documents to respond to events.
Still, it is the document that makes his career distinctive. Most people encounter a signed agreement as something to keep safe and consult when necessary. Hunn has spent years exploring the work it might perform along the way. The signature gets its ceremony. He has been paying attention to the much longer stretch that follows.