Contracts touch every part of the business, but the process around them is scattered. A request comes in over email. A draft lives on someone's desktop. Approvals happen in Slack. Finance flags a term three weeks late, and which “final” version is the right one is anyone's guess.
The work that actually decides a deal—the negotiation—has never had a system built to run it. So every new deal starts over from scratch. You chase down whoever worked on the last one like it, dig through old threads to see where things stand, or take a guess with your best judgment and push forward. Meanwhile the deal slows, and the intelligence that could have been created along the way—every position taken and concession made—disappears the moment the ink dries.
We at Ivo wondered: what if the whole process ran in one place, and every negotiation made the next one smarter?
Introducing Ivo Collaborate
Collaborate orchestrates the entire contracting lifecycle, from intake through approval, negotiation, and signature. It reads every agreement as it arrives, routes it based on the risk you define, and keeps every version, approval, and decision in one place.
And because the negotiation is finally running in one system, Collaborate learns from it. The back-and-forth where deals are won or delayed becomes intelligence your team retains and uses for the next one.
Collaborate is the layer between the deal and the signature. Where a traditional CLM routes documents based on inflexible rules and blind to what's inside them, Collaborate reads each agreement and runs the process around it.
A system that reads the contract on intake
Most contract work starts with a bottleneck right out of the gate: someone in the business needs an agreement, so they email legal and wait.
With Collaborate, intake is self-serve. Business users can start a deal request themselves, from the systems they already use, either by creating an agreement from a template or uploading one from the counterparty. Collaborate reads each document as it arrives, detects the type, extracts the relevant information, assesses its risk against your playbooks, links it to the opportunity in your CRM, and routes it to the right person.
There are no forms to fill and no fields to tag. Your team then confirms what Collaborate found, instead of keying it in by hand.
Routing and approvals that run themselves
Traditional systems route documents on rules someone set up in advance, with no sense of what's actually in the agreement. Collaborate routes based on the risk it actually finds and you only need to set the rules once, in plain language.
Low-risk agreements can move straight to signature. Anything that needs judgment goes to the right reviewer first, with the context ready and waiting for them. Every guardrail is yours to configure: you decide what "low" and "high" risk mean for your organization, so speed never comes at the cost of accuracy or control.
This is the shift the most sophisticated legal teams are already making. Rather than reading every line of every agreement, these teams simply set the rules and let the tool run.
Every deal in one place
Once a deal is in motion, Collaborate lets the whole process live in one single place.
Legal, sales, finance, and the counterparty can all work from the same deal, with every version and approval tracked beside it. The full history is right there: who changed what, who approved it, and where it stands today. The answer to "where are we on this" is on the screen, not forensically reconstructed from a weeks-old email thread.
Intelligence extracted from every negotiation
Because the negotiation runs in one place, it becomes something you can learn from. Collaborate can answer questions legal could never answer before, like:
- Which provisions you negotiate most
- Where your deals actually lose time
- Which of your own positions are adding turns to your deal cycles, and what each concession is worth
Over time, Collaborate can make proactive recommendations on how to update your playbooks, based on how your organization has negotiated before. Every deal you close teaches the next one.
Legal at the center
We built Collaborate because our most sophisticated customers already work this way: their lawyers proactively write the rules that govern risk across the whole portfolio, rather than reviewing each agreement on its own and in a vacuum. That is the shift that Collaborate is built for: putting legal’s invaluable insight and expertise at the center of every deal the business makes.
With Collaborate, Ivo now covers the full contracting lifecycle, from intake and negotiation through approval and signature, alongside Ivo Intelligence, Ivo Review, and Ivo Assistant.
Getting started on Collaborate
Ivo Collaborate is in early access today, with general availability later this year. Join the waitlist to be among the first enterprise legal teams to run their deals on Collaborate. If you'd like help getting your team set up, our solutions attorneys are here to help.
