Ep 138: Contract Wrangler Founder Neil Peretz on Starting, Building and Selling a Legal Tech Company

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Last month, in a marriage of two contract management platforms,</span> <a href= "https://conga.com/press/conga-acquires-contract-wrangler"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Conga acquired Contract Wrangler</span></a><span style= "font-weight: 400;">. For entrepreneur-turned-lawyer-turned-entrepreneur</span> <a href= "https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilperetz/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Neil Peretz</span></a><span style= "font-weight: 400;">, it was the conclusion of a journey that began five years earlier, when he founded Contract Wrangler with a vision of a contracts platform that would be more than just a repository, more than able to simply identify key clauses, but that would actually be able to provide answers to what was in those contracts. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What is it like to start, build and then sell a legal tech company? What were the challenges Peretz faced in developing the product and building a market? How did he see his product as distinct from other CLM platforms in the market? What was it like to see the company he started get acquired? On this episode of LawNext, we discuss those questions and others. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Peretz learned firsthand about the challenges of managing too many contracts as general counsel for multiple venture-backed financial services companies, including Aliya Financial Technologies and Better Finance. Even before becoming a lawyer, he was developing software to solve real-world problems, first as co-founder and CEO of PocketMail Group, which launched the first affordable mobile email service, and then as COO and CFO of Libraria/Sertanty, which used computer models to predict novel chemistries.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Peretz  holds law degrees from the UCLA School of Law and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (where he was a Fulbright Scholar), bachelors and masters degrees from Tufts University, and a specialization certificate from the Program on