Contracts aren't the whole story

We've spent countless hours with legal teams over the past few years. In every conversation about contracts, something interesting happens. We start talking about CLM features and workflows, but inevitably, the discussion shifts to everything else legal teams do.

"That's great for our contracts," they tell us, "but what about our policies? Our compliance frameworks? The institutional knowledge that walks out the door when someone leaves the team?"

It's a pattern that kept repeating. At first, we focused on making our CLM better – more features, more automation, more integrations. But eventually, we had to confront a fundamental truth: contracts are just one piece of a much larger puzzle.

The reality of in-house legal work is messier, more interconnected, and far more complex than any single system can capture. It's not just about what documents say, but why certain decisions were made. Not just what the law states, but how it applies to your specific business context.

The curious gap in legal tech

When we look at the legal tech landscape today, we notice something peculiar. We have specialized tools for discrete tasks – contract management, document storage, e-billing, matter management – but almost nothing that connects these islands of information into something coherent and actionable.

This gap became painfully clear in our user research sessions. We watched legal teams toggle between five different systems just to answer basic questions: "Why did we modify this clause in the last negotiation?" "How does this new regulation affect our existing contracts?" "What's our standard position on this issue across different jurisdictions?"

On the surface, these look like information retrieval problems. But dig deeper, and we realized they're actually knowledge synthesis problems. The information exists, but it's fragmented across systems, people, and time.

One GC told us something that stuck with us: "My team knows the answer to almost every question we get asked. The problem is that the right person isn't always available when the question comes up."

That's when we started thinking about Sidebar.

From CLM company to knowledge company

We started SpotDraft as a CLM company because contracts felt like the most urgent pain point for legal teams. They were drowning in paperwork, missing key dates, losing track of obligations. We built tools to solve those problems, and they worked.

But as we grew, our vision evolved. We realized we weren't just in the business of managing contracts – we were in the business of making legal knowledge accessible and actionable throughout an organization.

Sidebar represents this evolution. It's a product born from hundreds of conversations with legal teams who told us, in various ways, that their value goes far beyond contracts. They're knowledge workers who need better tools for capturing, sharing, and acting on that knowledge.

What Sidebar actually does

Sidebar is your legal team's always-on assistant. It tackles everything that lands on legal's desk beyond contracts – from policy questions to regulatory compliance to strategic advice.

Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Sidebar is specialized for legal work. It doesn't just search for information; it synthesizes it in context of your problem and helps you take action.

When your HR team has a question about a new state law, Sidebar doesn't just find the law – it connects it with your existing policies and helps draft a response that reflects your company's established practices.

Need to create data processing guidelines for a new market? Sidebar compiles relevant regulations and your current practices as a starting point, cutting hours of research down to minutes.

But what really sets Sidebar apart is how it works with our CLM to create a complete knowledge ecosystem. Your contracts inform your policies, and your policies inform your contracts. Nothing exists in isolation.

The moment we knew we were onto something

During early testing, one of our users had a moment that convinced us we were on the right track. She was preparing for a board meeting and needed to explain the legal implications of a recent regulatory change. In the past, she would have spent days compiling information from various sources, checking with different team members, and creating materials from scratch.

With Sidebar, she typed a single query: "Prepare a board briefing on how the EU AI Act affects our product roadmap."

Within minutes, Sidebar had pulled information from their contract database, connected it with the relevant sections of the Act, and drafted a comprehensive briefing document that reflected their specific business context. What would have been days of work was compressed into an hour of review and refinement.

"This isn't just saving me time," she said. "It's changing what's possible for my team."

That's when we knew we weren't just building a nice-to-have tool – we were creating something transformative.

How it works in practice

Let's look at a concrete example of how Sidebar transforms legal work:

Imagine you're launching a new AI product in Europe and need to ensure compliance with the EU AI Act. With traditional tools, you'd need to research regulations, create compliance checklists, update policies, and draft new contract templates – all in separate systems, with minimal connection between them.

With our integrated solution:

1. You start with a question: "What do we need to do to launch our AI product in Europe?"
   
   
2. Sidebar researches across your internal knowledge and trusted external sources, generating an action plan with specific tasks.
   
   
3. For each task – whether creating compliance documentation, updating policies, or drafting contracts – Sidebar leverages your organization's existing knowledge and preferences.
   
   
4. As you review and refine these outputs, both systems learn from your decisions, making future guidance even more aligned with your approach.
   
   
5. Most importantly, everything stays connected. When you update a policy, Sidebar identifies affected contracts. When you negotiate new terms, that knowledge feeds back into your policy guidance.
   
   

The result isn't just efficiency – it's a fundamentally different way of working.

Join our design partner program

We're taking an intentionally measured approach to Sidebar's rollout. Instead of a broad release, we're selecting a limited group of design partners who will help shape the product through its early stages.

Why this approach? Because we've learned that building truly transformative tools requires deep collaboration with the people who will use them every day. We want to get this right, which means working closely with teams who understand both the challenges and opportunities in this space.

As a design partner, you'll get early access to Sidebar, direct input into its development, and dedicated support from our team. More importantly, you'll help define the future of legal technology – creating tools that work the way you do, not the other way around.

We're particularly interested in forward-thinking legal teams who have already started thinking about how to better manage and leverage their collective knowledge. Teams who know there's a better way to work, even if they haven't figured out exactly what it looks like yet.

If that sounds like you, we'd love to have you join us on this journey.

Interested in becoming a Sidebar design partner? Apply to our limited preview program today.