Docusign launches AI tools for in-house legal teams

Docusign has introduced new artificial intelligence tools and partnerships for in-house legal teams, expanding its Intelligent Agreement Management platform.

The update includes an assistant and software agents built on its Iris AI engine, along with integrations with Harvey, Legora and CoCounsel Legal by Thomson Reuters.

Docusign is targeting a common problem in corporate legal departments, where contract work is often split across email, PDF files and separate software products. That fragmentation can leave lawyers and business teams manually searching older agreements for information and coordinating approvals across sales, procurement, human resources and finance.

The latest update is designed to move more of that work into a single contract process, from intake and drafting through negotiation, execution and management. According to Docusign, the new assistant and agents can draw on information from previous negotiations, accepted terms and internal policies to suggest next steps and handle parts of the workflow.

Legal teams will be able to analyse and redline agreements through a conversational interface with citations, while agents can be launched from a chat prompt or run in the background. Docusign is also introducing Agent Studio, a workspace for building and testing custom agents for agreement standardisation and automation.

Human oversight will remain in place where required, even as more tasks become automated. That is likely to matter for legal teams under pressure to work faster without losing control of risk, approvals and record-keeping.

Allan Thygesen, chief executive officer of Docusign, said the company's approach ties legal AI more closely to contract systems. "Legal teams aren't just reviewing contracts, they're helping businesses move forward," Thygesen said. "What Docusign brings to legal AI is dynamic context across agreements, combined with intelligent workflows, that know how to act on that context. That's what allows teams to work faster, reduce risk, and focus on more strategic work."

Open integrations

A central part of the announcement is Docusign's effort to position its platform as a connecting layer for legal and business software already used by corporate teams. Its open platform is intended to let specialist legal AI products plug into agreement workflows rather than operate as stand-alone tools.

That includes integrations with Harvey, Legora and CoCounsel Legal by Thomson Reuters, which are used for legal research, document analysis and contract review. The goal is to let in-house lawyers use those tools within a broader agreement process that also connects to internal business functions.

Docusign also said its platform can connect with large language models and workplace software through MCP. It named Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce and Slack among the systems that can link to Docusign services, allowing users to manage contracts inside tools they already use.

The broader strategy reflects a shift in legal technology buying as companies look beyond isolated AI features and focus on whether software fits into the day-to-day flow of commercial work. In-house legal teams increasingly want systems that can answer questions, review text and trigger action without forcing staff to switch between multiple products.

ROI claim

Docusign cited Deloitte research to support its argument for embedding AI directly in agreement workflows. It said organisations using agentic workflows with an end-to-end agreement platform are seeing nearly 30% higher return on investment than those that do not.

That claim points to a broader contest across business software, where suppliers are trying to show that AI can do more than summarise documents or surface data. The emphasis is shifting toward systems that can complete a sequence of tasks around approvals, negotiation and execution.

For Docusign, the launch also underlines its push beyond its long-standing identity in e-signature. The company described its direction as a move from electronic signing to a broader agreement management platform that acts on contract data as well as storing it.

That puts it in a competitive field where contract lifecycle management providers, legal AI start-ups and larger software groups are all pushing into workflow automation for legal teams. Docusign's pitch rests on the idea that contract context gathered across a business can make AI outputs more relevant and next steps more accurate.

Docusign said its assistant and agents are intended to help legal teams review, negotiate and move agreements forward more quickly while keeping business stakeholders updated on progress. According to the company, more than 1.8 million customers and over a billion users in more than 180 countries use its products.