Customer Stories
How SpyCloud turned a decade of contracts into a working knowledge base
Contract intelligence, portfolio analysis, and regulatory monitoring
A year ago, SpyCloud’s Legal & Compliance team set out to solve a problem familiar to growing companies: how to efficiently turn contract information into usable data and insights to support the business as it scales.
Answering a question about an individual agreement was one thing. Analyzing hundreds of agreements consistently, efficiently, and in a way that could be repeated and actioned upon was something entirely different.
The challenge was volume. Teams across SpyCloud rely on contract data to support day-to-day business operations. With ten years of contract history spread across their current CLM and legacy systems — and data automation and information requests coming in on a regular basis — relying on time-intensive, contract-by-contract review and data reconciliation wasn’t going to work. The team needed an efficient way to turn its contract data into usable information for the business, without a long runway to build it.
That’s where Ruli began to change the equation.
Building a knowledge base the team could trust
One of SpyCloud’s first priorities was structuring its contract portfolio so it could be queried at scale. Using Ruli to review and categorize a multi-year set of customer and procurement agreements in bulk proved to be an effective path to building a current, usable contracts dataset. Rather than the significant time investment of manually reviewing and sorting contract records, the team leveraged Ruli’s Data Grid to tackle that work systematically. The resulting dataset became the foundation the team can keep building on, rather than reassembling for every new question or contract metadata request.
For Senior Legal Operations Manager Jocelyn Bickford, that last piece turned out to be particularly important.
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“The biggest shift is that we have a dataset we trust. Instead of wondering if we’re missing something, we know the information is there, organized, and ready when we need it.”
— Jocelyn Bickford, Senior Legal Ops Manager, SpyCloud
From finding contracts to answering business questions
With that foundation in place, the team could change the way it approaches requests from across the business. When a question touches dozens or hundreds of agreements, the team can quickly identify the relevant contract population, apply a consistent analysis across, and deliver answers — often on the same day.
The benefit isn’t just speed. SpyCloud’s team feels more confident in the information working with Ruli provides, which frees up time to focus on interpreting the results and helping the business decide what to do with them.
For example, to respond to some internal inquiries, the team may need to determine which agreements contain terms that trigger a particular contractual notification requirement. Ruli allows the team to quickly do a broad review, identify the agreements that meet the relevant criteria, and focus its follow-up accordingly. Instead of taking an unnecessarily broad approach, legal advice is more targeted and grounded in the reality of the business — a distinction that becomes especially valuable when the answer has operational implications.
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“We’re not just finding contracts faster. We’re able to ask a question across the contract base, understand which agreements are actually relevant, and act on that. That’s a much more useful way for Legal to support the business.”
— Jocelyn Bickford, Senior Legal Ops Manager, SpyCloud
From answers to insight
That same ability to analyze a contract population consistently — rather than one agreement at a time — has opened the door to something bigger: portfolio-level analysis that simply wasn’t practical before. Using Data Grid and Projects together, the team can run consistent, repeatable analyses across the full contract population, surface broader patterns and trends, and create structured visibility that supports risk assessment and decision-making as the business grows faster than ever.
Ruli isn’t replacing the legal judgment behind those decisions. It’s a partner giving the team a more efficient foundation from which to apply it. It’s the kind of work the team had been looking to do but couldn’t land on a realistic way to execute it.
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“When we first started this project, I was strategizing about how to get through our hundreds of agreements. Now I’m thinking about what we can learn from them. That’s probably the biggest difference Ruli has made for us.”
— Jocelyn Bickford, Senior Legal Ops Manager, SpyCloud
Staying ahead of policy changes
Separately from contract work, the team also uses Ruli’s Monitor tool to track privacy and cybersecurity legislation relevant to SpyCloud’s business. The team had evaluated some dedicated policy-monitoring platforms, but with multiple projects already underway, needed an accurate way to get the information they needed that was usable and easy to filter for what mattered most, rather than a heavy lift to configure and maintain. Monitor fit that need: fast to configure and tune, with results filtered to what’s actually relevant.
A different way of working
A year into the relationship, Ruli’s role at SpyCloud looks different than it did at the beginning.
What started with making contract information more usable has evolved into a broader approach to contract, legal, and business intelligence: faster internal reporting, more targeted contractual analysis, portfolio-level risk visibility, reusable project work, and practical regulatory monitoring.
But perhaps the most meaningful change is how the team thinks about the work itself. Previous analysis becomes the foundation for the next project, letting the team execute at a scale and speed unattainable without Ruli. Legal professionals spend less of their time on the mechanics of gathering and organizing information and more of it on the analysis and judgment that create value for the business.
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“Ruli has become a force multiplier for our team. It allows us to take work that is inherently manual and resource-intensive and make it more efficient and repeatable, so we can spend more of our time on the work where Legal & Compliance adds the most value.”
— Jocelyn Bickford, Senior Legal Ops Manager, SpyCloud
For SpyCloud, that is the story of the first year with Ruli: not simply doing the same work faster but expanding what the Legal & Compliance function can accomplish.
See how Ruli helps in-house legal teams replace browser-tab research with concise, sourced answers.
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