ABOUT
Committed to Collaborative Contracting
Our mission is simple. Enable businesses to negotiate agreements up to 10x faster. Foster transparency and better outcomes by providing all parties to an agreement a first-class and neutral platform to collaboratively manage their contract compliance.
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.
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There is a massive community of business executives and professionals who want the same thing for their contracting process – collaboration, standardization, structured data … and of course speed. We’re building a unique platform to support these priorities, and with the collaborative community’s help we believe we can shape the future of contracting.
Jim Wagner, CEO & Co-founder
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Business executives want faster contracting. Period. Every agreement looks different, but the issues are always the same. It’s such a waste. We founded The Contract Network to solve this problem.
Bill Murphy, Co-founder
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I’ve felt the pressure to get deals done faster, and I’ve also had to answer to my auditors, regulators and board as to what our contracts actually say. It’s a catch-22 for every general counsel and executive … until now.
Bettina Drake, Chief Legal Officer
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I believe that business leaders fundamentally want to do the right thing. They want to lead, to innovate, and to move their businesses forward. When it comes to contracting, we just need to give them the tools they need to do it.
Phil Richards, Chief Technology Officer
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.
Bill Murphy, Co-founder
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.
Bettina Drake, Chief Legal Officer
Bettina is an accomplished business executive and general counsel. Most recently Bettina served as COO of eVestment, a part of Nasdaq, and VP of Nasdaq, where she developed significant expertise in the collection, anonymization and delivery of market data. Prior to her COO role, Bettina served as General Counsel of eVestment, and also as the General Counsel of Allconnect. Bettina graduated from The University of Virginia Law School and began her career as a corporate attorney at King & Spalding.
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.
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.