Built by lawyers, for lawyers.

Why we built Clauseharbor

In 2021, Margaret Sullivan was General Counsel at a mid-market technology company navigating a strategic acquisition. She had spent the previous seven years at Hargreave & Associates, a corporate law firm in Boston's financial district, before moving in-house. She understood M&A diligence from the outside counsel side. She thought she understood it from the buyer side too.

The deal team reviewed what they believed was the complete target contract repository — 900 agreements, organized by counterparty, worked through in order by priority. Contract number 847 was a vendor software agreement executed in 2019. It contained an auto-renewal provision requiring 90 days' written notice of non-renewal — a notice window that had already closed by the time the deal team reached it. The vendor invoked the renewal mid-diligence. The deal terms changed.

"We were not careless," Margaret says. "We reviewed hundreds of contracts under real time pressure and missed one. That's not a failure of effort — it's a failure of the process. No human team can hold 900 contracts in working memory at once. We were trying to do the impossible by hand."

In 2022, Margaret and co-founder David Okafor — who had spent four years building document intelligence infrastructure at Veridon Systems, a Boston-area legal document management platform — began building Clauseharbor. The premise was narrow and deliberate: scan an entire contract repository, flag the clauses that carry material legal risk, and let counsel do what only counsel can do.

Clauseharbor does not draft contracts, negotiate terms, or replace outside counsel. It reads the contracts you already have and tells you which ones need attention — across your entire repository, not just the one on your desk today.