Managing contracts across an enterprise has long been a sluggish, friction-filled chore. Legal, sales, and procurement teams routinely grapple with fragmented document repositories, slow negotiation rounds, and disconnected tech stacks. These manual bottlenecks delay deal closures, introduce compliance blind spots, and turn commercial agreements into administrative obstacles rather than catalysts for growth.
Zeal is rethinking this landscape by turning routine legal documents into dynamic, strategic assets. Through modern automation, deep systems integration, and AI-driven intelligence, the platform accelerates deal cycles, eliminates manual data silos, and safeguards compliance across the entire contract lifecycle. In this Executive Q&A, Matthew Solé, Founder and CEO of Zeal, shares how the company is redefining contract management for modern businesses and helping organizations negotiate, execute, and manage agreements with speed and precision.
Q: What critical operational challenges in enterprise contract management motivated you to build Zeal?
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Matthew Solé: In 2019, it was clear that routine legal work performed by in-house counsel teams was heading towards hyper-automation. Outsourcing to best-shore Centers of Excellence (COE’s) had become so common that its competitive advantage was diminishing. At the same time, industries were quickly adopting legal language standards that made automation easier, negotiations faster, and compliance less expensive. Zeal was an obvious answer for in-house legal ops teams, an AI contract management tool you could customize to their specific needs.
Q: Traditional contract lifecycle management software often focuses solely on document storage and standard redlining. How does Zeal take a different approach?
Matthew Solé: AI has moved fast enough that I'd call traditional contract management obsolete for in-house teams trying to keep up with it. The mandate now is doing more with less, and that means tools need an intelligence layer on top of automation, built on the richest source of data legal already has, the contracts themselves.
Different industries get value from that differently. A staffing company can pull comparative data on placements over time and use it to spot financial trends or where a client relationship is heading.
Then there's the revenue leakage figure that comes up almost every time a company starts looking at CLM, the gap between what a contract was negotiated for and what it actually delivers, often cited around 9%. Contract visibility closes that gap. Once legal can actually see what's happening across their agreements, they're not just tracking compliance, they're managing the relationship.
Q: Cross-platform collaboration is vital for fast-moving sales and operations teams. How do Zeal’s integrations—such as with CRMs and enterprise applicant tracking systems, streamline day-to-day deal velocity?
Matthew Solé: We build integrations around what each team actually needs, not a one-size-fits-all connector. On the staffing side, we integrate with some of the largest ATS platforms, JobDiva among them.
Waiting on legal sign-off is one of the most common points where a deal stalls. No matter how fast sales moves, the process is only as fast as its slowest step.
Staffing adds a layer most CLM vendors don't deal with, candidates. Through the JobDiva integration, recruiters can push legal documentation and placement paperwork through fast enough that a candidate's signature gets logged in hours instead of days. In a market this competitive, that speed matters as much as the deal itself. Every extra day a candidate spends waiting to sign is a day a competitor has to get to them first.
Q: With artificial intelligence rapidly altering legal operations, how is Zeal utilizing AI and automation to enhance contract intelligence without compromising security or regulatory standards?
Matthew Solé: We wanted AI to make sense for legal teams first, not to be an add-on for its own sake. The challenge is that legal language isn't standardized, every in-house team tends to develop its own way of writing and interpreting contracts. So before we could build anything AI-driven, we had to solve that problem first.
That's what led to the Legal Language Framework, the first of its kind. The thesis is simple: contract wording changes deal to deal, but the underlying legal logic is finite and predictable. Instead of treating a contract as a block of unstructured text, the framework treats it as structured data. Once teams adopt that same structure, they end up speaking the same language, both to each other and to the AI layer sitting on top of it.
Anton, our AI tool, is built on that framework. It's designed as an extension of the legal team's own toolset, not a bolt-on. Legal professionals can ask Anton questions about a contract, search for specific terms, or dig into a topic across their whole contract set to surface insights they'd otherwise have to dig for manually.
On security, we're SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified, both audited annually by an independent CPA firm across security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy over a twelve-month observation period.
Q: Compliance and post-signature visibility often present significant blind spots for growing organizations. How does Zeal ensure visibility, risk mitigation, and active vendor management after a contract is signed?
Matthew Solé: Zeal’s primary features address pre-execution workflows, including counterparty collaboration, approval workflows, and native e-signature capabilities. However, the platform’s greatest value is realized in the post-execution phase. Leveraging agentic technology, Zeal continuously monitors contractual obligations across the repository and proactively guides users through predefined workflows. Organizations can configure the obligations and risk areas that matter most, while Zeal provides ongoing visibility into the health and status of their contract portfolio. Another key capability is Zeal’s vendor management portal, which connects to more than 20 information sources to provide near-real-time visibility into the health and risk profile of vendors associated with an organization’s agreements. For example, if a change of control occurs and is reported through one of these connected sources, Zeal can automatically notify the appropriate internal teams. The vendor portal also enables vendors to engage directly with Zeal and self-report updated certifications, audits, or other compliance documentation. This creates a more efficient, proactive approach to vendor oversight, helping ensure vendors maintain the requirements and compliance standards expected by the organizations they support.
Q: Looking ahead, how do you see the contract lifecycle management sector evolving, and what are your core priorities for expanding Zeal’s capabilities?
Matthew Solé: The space is moving away from static repositories toward connected, data-first platforms that actually move business forward. Modernizing negotiation, automating approvals, and syncing data across the systems that matter, that's what cuts risk and gets agreements finalized faster.
As operations get more interconnected, the companies with scalable contract infrastructure are the ones that pull ahead of the ones still bogged down in legal friction. Zeal's whole bet is that contracts stop being static paperwork and start being a strategic asset. Companies that treat them that way protect their margins, stay compliant, and build stronger relationships with the people they do business with.
