"Instead of taking two to three days to answer even simple questions, we can now answer in a day or less. It compresses the whole workflow because we can get things through to signature so much faster."
Summary
- With nearly 7,000 contracts to manage each year, SharkNinja's Legal team needed a scalable solution to keep pace and manage the increasing contract volume. They got Ivo up and running with no disruption to existing workflows; they just installed a Word plugin. There was no formal CLM integration required, and they didn’t need clause libraries or playbooks to get started.
- First pass contract review turnaround dropped from two to three days to a day or less, compressing the entire contracting timeline from first review through signature.
- Outside counsel sends for foreign-language contracts fell from one to two per week to one to two total, with China agreement response times dropping from three to four days to within 24 hours.
- SharkNinja got more than a redlining tool: Ivo Assistant's drafting, research, and analysis capabilities delivered value the team didn't anticipate when they first started evaluating.
About SharkNinja
SharkNinja is a pioneer in small household appliances, with over $6 billion in sales in 38 markets around the world, including products like the Ninja Luxe Café Pro Espresso Machine, the Shark FlexStyle, and the Ninja CREAMi. Over the past five years, the company has exploded in growth, going from selling vacuums and blenders to now launching 25 new products a year across 38+ categories.
Amy Heikes, SharkNinja’s Legal Contracts Manager, joined the company in 2019 and moved to the legal department in 2022; she’s had a front-row seat to the company’s impressive growth. “At SharkNinja, speed is part of how we operate,” says Amy. “The business is constantly innovating and launching new products, so our team needs to move just as quickly. Every agreement plays a role in helping bring those innovations to market.”
She compares her role to that of an air traffic controller: “I review, triage and prioritize incoming contract requests, coordinating them through the review process so the most time-sensitive matters receive the right attention while everything else continues moving efficiently.”
Scaling with the business
When Amy joined SharkNinja, the legal team managed three to four thousand contracts annually. Today, that number had nearly doubled to approximately 7,000 contracts a year, reflecting the company’s rapid growth.
“As the business expanded, so did the volume and complexity of the agreements we were supporting,” said Amy. “We needed a way to keep pace with that growth while continuing to provide fast, high-quality support to the business.”
The team’s global footprint also meant managing agreements across multiple languages and jurisdictions. Many of those contracts required outside counsel, adding cost and extending turnaround times due to coordination across firms and time zones.
When Amy started evaluating solutions, SharkNinja was also launching Jailbreak, the company’s enterprise-wide initiative to accelerate the use of AI across the business."We already had a clear business need,” said Amy. “Then, with Jailbreak, leadership encouraged teams to think differently about how AI could solve real business challenges. The timing couldn’t have been better.”
What SharkNinja looked for in an AI contract tool
SharkNinja's legal team did not have a formal clause library as a starting point. Amy recalls that when they first started with Ivo, they were able to hand over their contract templates and rely on Ivo’s support to help build out their first playbooks. Finding something they could use out of the box, without spending months building infrastructure first, was critical.
Other tools fell short. "We looked at other systems. Some could do things out of the box, but the capablilities felt limited- nothing that really seemed innovative beyond basic redlining,” she observed. “Ivo was different. Even without playbooks in place, it could review third-party paper, pull out the risks, summarize key terms, identify vendor redlines, and suggest responses. That level of capability without setup time was what set it apart." Amy also noted that the AI Assistant feature is widely used to help draft agreements, review and improve templates, and for general research.
Ease of use was equally important for the SharkNinja team. Amy and her team demoed their CLM's redlining module alongside Ivo. "It wasn't even close,” she says. “The CLM had trouble recognizing whose redlines were whose. Ivo was plug and play."
What AI implementation actually looks like
Implementation was straightforward with a simple Word plugin. The support team helped build out the playbooks, and SharkNinja’s legal team was able to start reviewing contracts immediately, with no disruption to existing workflows.
That was intentional. "We weren't ready to make major change management moves. We wanted to get the benefits of AI without overhauling everything else. We brought Ivo in, started using it, and it made us faster without disrupting our current workflows."
Ivo and SharkNinja's CLM work alongside each other without any formal integration. "We open a document in Word, check it out to edit it, use Ivo for review and redlining, and save it right back to the CLM. No integration required. It fit naturally into how we already work."
Speed, savings, and coverage across 7,000 contracts a year
Amy notes that the biggest workflow change is speed. SharkNinja can now turn around work that used to take two or three days in a day or less. The whole contracting timeline has shrunk.
She also says that the team’s reliance on outside counsel for contract reviews has dropped significantly, especially on foreign-language contracts. “All of SharkNinja's China agreements used to go to outside counsel due to the language roadblock. It didn't matter if it was a simple low-value agreement or a complex deal; everything went out,” she says. “Ivo enabled us to drastically reduce our reliance on outside counsel for a lot of that work. We were sending one or two things a week, and now we handle most of that in-house using Ivo." Even with the time zone challenge, Amy can now get back to China-based business teams within 24 hours of receiving a request, versus three to four days before.
Template localization has also moved in-house. Amy says, "We used to send agreements to outside counsel and say, 'We need a UK version' or 'We need this for Germany.' Now we can run the agreement through Ivo and ask it to propose changes that would make it legally appropriate for that jurisdiction. Even our U.S. attorneys can now work on agreements for France, Germany, or the UK with Ivo flagging country-specific considerations."
On a day-to-day level, Amy's most frequent workflow is simple and repeatable. "The thing I probably do ten times a day: drop a vendor contract into Ivo, ask for a summary of the key terms and any high-risk areas, then follow up with a request for a table of suggested redlines to address those areas. It gives me a head start on what to bring back to the business, what to accept, what to push back on."
As someone without a legal background, that workflow previously required a lot of back-and-forth with attorneys. Now even non-attorney Legal team members can do a basic risk assessment, because Ivo distinguishes between low-risk flags and genuinely high-risk areas. This reduces escalations to the matters that actually need attorney attention. "That enablement of somebody even at a lower level in legal to take on some of that review has helped us immensely with taking workload off the attorneys,” she notes.
The value that surprises most teams going in
Amy has two pieces of advice for new Ivo customers to get the most value out of the tool. "When we first started looking, we were mostly thinking about contract review. What we didn't anticipate was how much value we'd get from Ivo Assistant—the drafting, the research, the analysis. If you go in evaluating only for redlining capability, you'll underestimate what you're actually buying."
Amy's other piece of advice is practical: just talk to it. "I'm not technical at all, but I learned early that the most effective approach is just being conversational. If it doesn't give you exactly what you want, tell it. It corrects itself. Once the team stopped trying to 'prompt' it correctly and just started talking to it like an assistant, adoption got a lot easier."
Matching the pace of the whole company
Bringing Ivo in has created opportunities to leverage Legal as a resource and not a roadblock. "This made everybody realize that using AI to make our team more efficient and create better outcomes for the business—that's something Ivo enabled us to do,” Amy says. “It has made the team more productive and able to keep pace with the rest of the company. And everyone was excited about launching the tool, all the way up to the CLO. That recognition felt good."
