ABOUT
Faster Contracts. Faster Cures.
We’re uniting the research community, empowering faster contracting through AI-powered insights, reusable agreement data, and real-time market intelligence. When the research community works smarter together, we discover more and treatments reach patients sooner.
Executive Team
Our founders and leadership team have served as leaders at some of the largest companies in the world, including Blackstone, DocuSign, Nasdaq, and Bank of America.
They have experienced the drag that contracting delays can have on the performance of any business, and have come together with a common vision of fundamentally changing the way that contracts are negotiated and managed.
Jim Wagner, CEO & Co-founder
Jim is a serial entrepreneur in the legal technology community, most recently serving as VP of Agreement Cloud Strategy for DocuSign, which he joined when DocuSign acquired AI leader Seal Software (where Jim served as President) in 2020. Jim has authored multiple patents and is a recognized leader in the fields of artificial intelligence and analytics for contracting. Jim graduated from Duke University Law School, where he is a frequent guest lecturer and serves on the Duke Law Tech Lab advisory board.
“We envision a world where businesses … achieve outcomes faster, and share vital information, deadlines, and milestones without friction.”
Phil Richards, Chief Technology Officer
Phil is an accomplished technology leader and entrepreneur. Prior to The Contract Network, Phil was co-founder and CTO at Clairvoya, where he developed innovative and unique technology in a SaaS platform for tracking PII and sensitive data of unstructured documents. Clairvoya was sold to Breakwater Solutions, where he served as CTO. Phil spent many years innovating in natural language analytics and data processing (while authoring many patents) as the CTO of DiscoverReady and as an Senior Vice President at Bank of America. In his dual Masters program at MIT, Phil researched many principles directly related to how The Contract Network will improve the contracting process, including how transparency and market dynamics can lead to process improvements and on how reducing volatility in a system will inherently improve almost every other aspect of system performance.
“The research community deserves technology that understands their unique challenges. We’re not building generic contract tools—we’re creating an AI experience that speaks the language of research-related agreements.”
Maya Pochiraju, Chief Product Officer
Maya is an experienced product and operations leader. Before joining The Contract Network, she was Chief Operating Officer at Payability, a fintech company serving eCommerce sellers, where she led product, go-to-market, and customer success. Previously, Maya was a Vice President in Blackstone’s Innovations Group, driving firmwide technology initiatives across investor experience, fundraising, new-business regulation, and cloud transformation. She also serves on the board of StreetWise Partners. Maya received BAs in both Economics and Information Science from Cornell University.
“The research community needs tools that actually fit their workflow, not another system that creates more work. As a product leader, I’m obsessed with building features that the community can use intuitively and immediately.”
Bill Murphy, Co-founder & Advisor
Bill Murphy is a Managing Partner at Cresting Wave, bringing Innovative technologies to the enterprise technology community. Bill is also a board member at Cherre and Qualytics and a Senior Advisor to McKinsey.
Bill was a Senior Managing Director and the Chief Technology Officer at Blackstone, leading the Blackstone Innovations team from 2011-2020, responsible for the firm’s use of technology along with a strategic technology investment portfolio. Mr. Murphy also served on many boards of directors of our investments along with the board of the Blackstone Charitable foundation.
From 1999 – 2011, Bill was founding Chief Technology Officer for Capital IQ where he was responsible for overseeing all product design, development, infrastructure and technology support and was involved with all operations of the business. Before Capital IQ, Mr. Murphy led teams at Sapient, delivering solutions for large clients primarily in financial services. Mr. Murphy received a BSE in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, Class of ‘96.
“Contracting is an epidemic of inefficiency … even in an industry where time literally saves lives. The Contract Network exists to solve this critical problem once and for all.”
Jeff Ward, Special Advisor
Jeff is Director of the Duke Center on Law & Technology (DCLT) at Duke Law, where he teaches Contracts, the Future of Contracts, and other courses at the intersection of law, emerging tech, and ethics such as Frontier A.I. & Robotics. As Director of the DCLT, he oversees programs that include the Duke Law Tech Lab, a pre-accelerator program for early-stage legal tech companies, and Duke Law By Design, which uses design methodologies to help ensure that new technologies ultimately empower and ennoble all people and expand access to quality legal services. He is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a Faculty Affiliate at both Duke’s Initiative for Science & Society and Pratt School of Engineering, where he teaches Legal, Ethical, and Societal Implications of Artificial Intelligence and other courses.
“The future of research depends on the community’s ability to bring efficiency and accelerate every step of the process, especially contracting.”