Docusign CLM vs Leegality: how they compare in 2026
Docusign CLM suits a team building contract processes around Salesforce or other established enterprise systems, using configurable steps for generation, review, approval and storage. Leegality is a closer operational fit when Indian stamping and several domestic signature methods need to sit beside clause review and obligation tracking. The distinction goes beyond having electronic signatures: Docusign CLM is a workflow and repository product, while Leegality brings its existing Indian document execution infrastructure into contracting. The review by AI Legal Index identifies Docusign's more than one hundred configurable workflow steps as a concrete advantage for teams assembling varied approval processes. Leegality offers a more specific path from a customer rule set to an internal reviewer, eStamp and eSign. Both require a scoped proposal for AI enabled contract operations, and Leegality's Basic transaction rates are not a comparable CLM subscription.
At a glance
All 15 axes, side by side
The same grid applied to every vendor in the index, graded from public sources. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
The core of CLM is a workflow and document system. It generates contracts from templates, keeps a clause library, and stores agreements in a repository with reporting. A drag and drop workflow designer offers more than 100 preconfigured steps for generation, review, approval, signature and storage. That system dates from SpringCM, which Docusign agreed to buy in 2018, before generative AI was part of it. AI now drives several core functions. More than 100 pretrained models extract and report on contract data points and legal topics. AI-Assisted Review flags nonstandard clauses and suggests redlines against a playbook. Generative features summarize agreements, draft clauses on request and answer questions about the repository. Docusign brands the engine Iris and describes it as trained on decades of contract data. Workflows can start from analytics, risk scores and contract content, so extracted data drives routing as well as lookups in the repository.
Leegality's original business is document execution, including Aadhaar signatures, stamp paper procurement, approval routing and delivery of completed agreements. Those services retain their purpose without generative models. AI Review adds clause analysis against rules defined by the legal or compliance team, explanations of deviations and suggested replacement language. Obligations AI extracts commitments and assigns their owners, while Smart Extraction fills repository metadata from uploaded agreements. These are identifiable applications of AI to legal work rather than a relabeling of signature automation. They remain features within a broader paperwork platform whose commercial offering also includes document fraud prevention and electronic bank guarantees.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Docusign describes Iris as delivering accurate, secure and trusted agreement intelligence. Its AI Trust page says AI outputs have been tested for accuracy, and that diverse datasets and checks correct skewed outputs before release. Docusign publishes no figure, error rate, test set or evaluation method for CLM extraction, AI-Assisted Review or agreement summaries. The numbers it gives for the review product are time savings, such as 72 to 80 percent saved on contract reviews, with no stated baseline. Section 6.2 of the AI Attachment for Docusign Services, version 8 July 2026, warns that the AI may produce incorrect output, given the probabilistic nature of machine learning. The same section places review for accuracy on the customer. CLM works from the customer's own contracts and clause library rather than from law. Docusign does not describe how a summary or an answer links back to the clause it came from.
The AI review interface ties a finding to a customer rule and the relevant contract clause. Its example distinguishes requirements that are met, not met or not found, and displays the current clause beside a suggested replacement. That gives a reviewer useful context for deciding whether a contractual requirement has been satisfied. It does not establish legal correctness beyond the supplied rules. No measured error rate, benchmark dataset or independent validation method accompanies the clause review feature. Nor is there a described legal authority retrieval system that supplies primary cases or statutes and verifies their current status before a proposed revision is used.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
AI-Assisted Review suggests edits and flags risky language for a reviewer to accept or reject. CLM workflows send agreements with nonstandard terms to review under conditional rules the customer sets, and they can also be triggered automatically by analytics, risk scores and contract content. Every action sits in an audit trail of who did what and when, with version control across drafts. Section 6.2 of the AI Attachment makes the customer responsible for reviewing and evaluating AI output for accuracy and suitability, including through human review. The AI Trust page says the customer has the final say to approve outputs. Docusign does not set out what an AI step may do without a person, at what confidence an extraction is held for review, or what happens after an AI output is found to be wrong.
Legal and compliance teams define the rules that constrain AI Review, then inspect deviations and the reasons attached to them. The contract interface gives users separate actions to replace a clause or dismiss its proposed replacement. Leegality Reviewer adds a configurable approval gate: the sender assigns internal or external reviewers, who can approve or reject the agreement before it proceeds to the signer. Obligations AI separately uses configured obligation types, owners and email reminders. These controls distinguish automated extraction from human contract approval. Their protection depends on configuring the reviewer step; AI analysis alone does not turn a proposed contract into an approved agreement.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
The CLM page carries four customer stories, each naming the customer, giving figures and quoting a named, titled speaker. T-Mobile Wholesale cut agreement time by 44 percent without adding headcount, with 1.8 times faster cycle time on high value agreements, says Janet Sutherland, Senior Manager of Sales Enablement. Keith McCarraher, Special Projects Manager at the automotive parts distributor, describes more than ten use cases across five departments. Vestwell reports agreement packages built in 5 minutes instead of 75 and 70 percent fewer drop offs, quoted by its COO, Jon Mark. At iCIMS, 78 percent of the company's agreements need no legal involvement, according to Courtney Dutter, Deputy General Counsel. The page also states a 449 percent return on investment, an 85 percent reduction in errors and 2,200 enterprise CLM customers, without naming the study or the customers behind those figures. No story gives a deployment date or a measurement method.
Rupifi's in house counsel Satyanshu Mishra describes using Leegality's contract management product and its configuration options, with the vendor's support helping the team adopt the platform. That is a named legal user discussing the product rather than an unexplained customer logo. The broader execution business also reports IIFL Samasta increasing daily loans per branch from roughly 30 to 35 to roughly 40 to 45 after digitizing paperwork. Those operational figures concern the signing process, not the accuracy or speed of AI clause review. The contract testimonial has no dated baseline, review sample or measurement isolating the contribution of the models.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
The Docusign Master Services Agreement, version 14 November 2022, keeps Customer Data owned by the customer (3.1). Confidential information may be used only for the purpose given and must be protected with at least reasonable care (11.1). Liability for a breach of confidentiality sits outside the twelve month fee cap (10.2). The AI Attachment treats AI output as Customer Confidential Information. Section 4.1 of the AI Attachment grants Docusign a perpetual license to use CLM customer data and AI output, once anonymized and aggregated, to train models. Section 4.2 lets the customer switch that off going forward with a toggle in the product. Section 4.3 of the MSA separately lets Docusign use deidentified usage data, including for training. Within a customer account, CLM folder security limits who sees which contracts. The agreements and the product pages do not address privilege or work product.
Contract data is covered by an express product commitment against use in training any AI model. Leegality also states that AI review and obligation extraction read the agreement without retaining another copy, while the repository continues to hold the underlying contract. Its privacy notice describes encryption, approved access on a need to know basis and processing of signer data on customer instructions. These protections give corporate legal teams a concrete confidentiality position. They do not explain privilege preservation, separate law firm matters or the identity and contractual duties of the models underneath. Role restrictions on document execution are narrower than a documented ethical wall for AI answers.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
Section 6.2 of the AI Attachment, the contract that governs CLM's AI features, states that neither Docusign, the AI Services nor AI output provide the customer with legal advice. The same section leaves suitability for any purpose to the customer's sole discretion and has the customer review output for accuracy, including through human review. CLM is sold to sales, procurement, human resources and customer experience teams as well as legal. AI-Assisted Review proposes redlines and drafts clauses for any of those users. Docusign does not say who in a customer reviews an AI redline before it reaches a counterparty, how the product supports a lawyer's competence and supervision duties, or whether any limit applies by jurisdiction.
Leegality identifies itself as a software business rather than a law firm and addresses business, product, operations and legal teams. Its terms place responsibility for appropriate stamp duty, document enforceability and retention requirements on the customer. The service is framed around Indian law, and customers outside India are responsible for assessing local suitability. This gives a clear boundary around the provider's role in document execution. The AI feature nevertheless describes clause replacements as compliant with the customer's rules without a corresponding account of professional competence duties. No bar specific supervision framework explains how a lawyer should validate those suggestions before advising a client.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
Docusign publishes AI Trust and AI Innovation Principles pages for Iris, the engine behind CLM's AI features. The AI Trust page lists encryption in transit and at rest, consent based training on aggregated and anonymized data, and content filtering for harmful outputs. It also describes diverse datasets and checks that correct skewed outputs before deployment, and adoption of frameworks such as the NIST AI framework. Section 6.1 of the AI Attachment warrants that, to Docusign's knowledge, it holds sufficient permissions for the data used to train its own models. That data is defined as customer data authorized for that use, publicly available data and licensed data. Docusign names no person, committee or team as accountable for model behavior and lists no ISO/IEC 42001 certification. It publishes no test results, including on whether output differs across contract types, languages or regions. The AI Trust page says broader AI Trust capabilities are available through sales.
Customer rule sets define what AI Review looks for in an agreement, but those rules are an application control rather than an account of how Leegality governs its models. There is no named AI governance owner, release testing program, bias assessment or report of differences in performance across languages and contract types. The platform's Indian language signing options and identity verification features do not answer those questions for clause interpretation. Information security certifications address a different set of controls. A legal team therefore receives a configurable review workflow without a published mechanism for assessing systematic model errors or the vendor's response when those errors recur.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
Under section 3.1 of the Service Schedule for Docusign CLM, version 15 September 2025, documents are stored for the subscription term or until the customer deletes them. An account administrator can set a different retention and deletion schedule. Retrieval is free during the term and available for 90 days after it through professional services, after which Docusign may delete the account and its documents (3.2). The Data Protection Attachment, version 4 September 2024, commits to notice of a data breach without undue delay, giving its nature, likely consequences and the measures taken. It also commits to deletion of personal data on request. Docusign's subprocessor list, last updated 18 September 2026, has its own CLM section naming each hosting and AI supplier with locations. Updates go out through an RSS feed, and objections go by email. Agreement contents are encrypted at rest, and folder security controls access inside an account. Section 4.1 of the AI Attachment lets Docusign keep training data derived from customer content after termination, with no duty to delete it. Docusign does not state what Microsoft or Google keep from prompts.
The privacy notice separates account data from document and signer information processed on customer instructions. It describes encryption during transfer and storage, access approval, monitoring and audits. Uploaded agreements remain for a period determined by customer settings or legal requirements, and the pricing feature list includes automatic purging of signed files. Several service providers and their purposes are named, including the hosting company, signature authorities and electronic stamping services. The AI product adds a commitment not to retain another document copy during processing. Missing pieces include named model subprocessors, a complete prompt and output retention schedule and a customer incident notification timetable.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
The Master Services Agreement, version 14 November 2022, warrants that the services perform substantially as documented (8.1). The remedy is repair, replacement, or termination and a prorated refund. Docusign indemnifies the customer against third party claims arising from its breach of confidentiality and from intellectual property infringement (9.1). Liability is capped at fees paid for the service in the twelve months before the first event (10.2). The cap does not apply to indemnity obligations, confidentiality breaches, gross negligence or willful misconduct. The AI Attachment narrows these terms for AI. Section 6.2 disclaims all warranties on AI output and says Docusign is not liable for output to the extent it includes customer data. It also removes the indemnity where a claim arises from the customer's data, its own modifications or output it knew to infringe. The agreements do not cover loss from a wrong extraction or redline, and Docusign publishes nothing on insurance.
Leegality's standard terms disclaim responsibility for the contents and enforceability of agreements and do not warrant that service results will be accurate or reliable. The liability formula is the greater of INR 100 or fees associated with executing a document, excluding specified expenses and charges, subject to an aggregate ceiling of INR 10,000 per user. Consequential and other indirect losses are excluded. The indemnity runs from the user to Leegality, with no corresponding published protection for an erroneous AI revision. A separately signed agreement takes precedence, so enterprise buyers may have different provisions; the public terms themselves offer little recourse for faulty legal output.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
Docusign's Salesforce integration for CLM generates documents and runs workflows across Salesforce Customer 360. With SAP Ariba, users create supplier agreements, ingest third party paper and track workflow tasks from Ariba. The Coupa integration lets contracts be created or updated in either system. Slack carries review notifications and actions, and comments sync between Microsoft Word, Google Docs and CLM. AI-Assisted Review runs inside Word, and Docusign eSignature is built in. The CLM API in the Docusign Developer Center offers object, task and content APIs for Salesforce and custom applications. Docusign Monitor, sold as an extra on top of CLM, reports CLM event activity, including through Splunk. Docusign University runs courses on building custom CLM integrations. The named integrations include no document management system used by law firms, such as iManage or NetDocuments. The product pages do not say which fields move in which direction for each connector.
The Word extension has an explicit setup path through the Microsoft marketplace followed by a Leegality login. Users see assigned tasks in the sidebar, run rule based AI review and share agreements with counterparties from the editor. Guests can review online or download, edit and upload their version without creating an account. Outside Word, APIs connect document journeys to a customer's CRM, loan systems or HR software; webhooks return signed documents to customer servers. These are described transfers and actions, not just integration logos. Permission mapping, version conflict handling and a complete implementation account for each connected business system remain unspecified.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
Docusign's subprocessor list names CLM's hosting suppliers and places each by where the service is provisioned. The hosts are Equinix in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, Switch in the United States, and Microsoft Azure in the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union and Japan. AI processing is listed separately. Azure AI services for review, summaries and extraction run in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia and Japan. Google processing for the CLM Analyzer service runs in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Government editions are separate deployments. The CLM Service Schedule keeps government customer data inside Docusign's FedRAMP Moderate boundary unless a connector exports it (5.2). The DoD Impact Level 4 edition requires a connection to NIPRnet through a boundary cloud access point (5.3). Docusign does not describe the tenancy model for commercial customers and offers no on premises option.
Leegality operates a hosted platform accessed through its dashboard, Word extension or APIs. Both storage and processing of contract data are expressly restricted to servers in India, including AI review and obligation extraction. The privacy notice identifies Amazon Internet Services Private Limited as the hosting provider and likewise places personal data processing in India. There is no advertised alternative region for a customer to select, nor a published private installation offering. The geographic commitment therefore covers the available service rather than a menu of deployment tiers. It does not identify the individual model service or give a detailed account of backup locations within the country.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
The certifications page Docusign publishes lists ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification enterprise wide, ISO/IEC 27017:2015 and 27018:2019, and PCI DSS 4.0. Annual SOC 1 Type II and SOC 2 Type II audits cover all production operations, including data centers. FedRAMP agency authorization, GovRAMP authorization and a Defense Information Systems Agency Impact Level 4 provisional authorization each name CLM directly. Reports and certificates are available in the Docusign Trust Portal, and the annual CSA STAR CAIQ is public on the CSA registry. Docusign also completes the Shared Assessments SIG, S&P Global KY3P and ProcessUnity assessments each year. USDM assesses its 21 CFR Part 11 module annually. C5 Type II covers the eSignature product only and does not extend to CLM.
The privacy notice names ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27017:2015 and ISO 27018:2019, alongside a SOC 2 Type II attestation covering security, availability and confidentiality. It describes recurring independent audits and separately refers to CERT IN empaneled auditors for Aadhaar and signature requirements. Leegality also provides a trust center entry point and offers its SOC report and auditor details on request. The public statements do not supply the attestation period, named auditor or an inspectable report establishing the full product scope. The standards are more specific than generic security badges, but their existence does not by itself validate the quality of AI contract interpretation.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
The October 2026 subprocessor list assigns AI suppliers to specific CLM features. Azure OpenAI Service handles current AI Assisted Review and agreement summaries, while Azure AI Document Intelligence handles extraction. Google processes CLM Analyzer, and Docusign's DocuSmart subsidiary, trading as Lexion, handles legacy AI Assisted Review for selected United States customers. Countries are specified by service provisioning, and customers can subscribe to updates and object on data protection grounds. Model families and versions are not identified for these CLM services. Gemini naming in the separate Agreement Manager section does not establish that CLM uses the same model or configuration.
Neither the AI Review explainer nor the contract product description identifies the model family or inference provider used for clause analysis and obligation extraction. The privacy notice names the infrastructure host and several execution providers, but it does not distinguish an AI model service from general hosting. A commitment to processing in India and avoiding training on contracts addresses location and use of data, not the identity of the model supplier. There is also no published model change notification procedure. Customers can understand the review workflow while still lacking the information needed to assess a particular foundation model or its replacement.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
A CLM subscription is prepaid and measured by a seat allowance, a document count or both, depending on the edition (4). The Service Schedule for Docusign CLM publishes that charging structure, but Docusign publishes no CLM price. Every call to action on the CLM page, Get Started included, goes to Contact Sales. The site's plans and pricing links lead to eSignature and IAM plans, none of which includes CLM. Under section 4.3, extra seats are charged pro rata at list price for the rest of the term. Documents over the count are charged per document at list price and invoiced monthly in arrears. Seats can be reassigned between people without penalty, and documents exported and then deleted during the term still count. Retrieval after the term ends is a paid professional services engagement. Editions named across Docusign's documents include CLM Essentials, CLM, CLM+ and the AI Extension for CLM, alongside government and DoD Impact Level 4 editions.
Basic execution has explicit transaction prices: INR 25 for each Aadhaar signatory and INR 15 for each non Aadhaar signatory. Digital stamping costs INR 45 per paper plus stamp duty and INR 500 per order, with a minimum of 30 papers; signing requires at least INR 100 of credits. The Basic account includes one user and one workflow. Advanced business features require a quote, and the advertised INR 300,000 annual budget dividing line is not an AI subscription price. A first flow can be configured and tested free, but implementation charges beyond that and the cost or allowance for AI Review are not published.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
CLM is sold to legal, sales, procurement, human resources and customer experience teams. Its named customer stories come from wholesale telecom, auto parts distribution, retirement plan administration and recruiting software. Government use runs through CLM Government Products, authorized under FedRAMP and GovRAMP, and a DoD Impact Level 4 edition. Docusign says 2,200 enterprises use CLM for contract management. Its integrations with SAP Ariba and Coupa point at procurement as well as sales contracting. Docusign frames coverage by department and industry rather than by contract type or area of law. It names no minimum customer size, no law firm use, and no contract types the AI handles poorly. The IAM plans page states AI extraction in English, French and German, and the CLM pages give no language list.
Leegality focuses on Indian business paperwork, with named uses in banking, lending, microfinance, stockbroking, insurance, human resources and procurement. Contract examples include vendor agreements, master services agreements, nondisclosure agreements, employment letters and loan documentation. Legal teams can define their own compliance rules while business colleagues initiate work, approve it or sign. The terms and privacy notice explicitly center Indian law and leave overseas suitability to the customer. This is a clearer audience than a claim to serve every practice. It is not a published coverage map for litigation, specialist legal research or the full range of legal issues a generated clause might raise.
The 12 legal signals, side by side
Recorded rather than graded. These are the questions a practitioner has to answer before a tool touches a client matter, and the answers are taken from public material only.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
Section 4.1 of the AI Attachment for Docusign Services, version 8 July 2026, grants Docusign a perpetual license to use customer data and AI output to train models and improve its services generally. The data and output are anonymized and aggregated first. The attachment's applicability table says customers on a Master Services Agreement consent to that training for Docusign CLM. Section 4.2 lets the customer opt out at any time with a toggle in the product, on a going forward basis.
Docusign keeps the training data created before the opt out, with no duty to delete it. The AI Trust page describes the same program as consent based. Customers whose subscription began before 8 July 2026 are pointed to earlier versions of the terms.
Leegality promises that contract data used for AI review or obligation extraction is never used to train any AI model. That promise appears in its contract product explanation, rather than an express model training restriction in the standard terms. The incorporated privacy notice limits signer processing to customer instructions and permits analytics on usage information. It does not clearly grant a separate right to train on agreement content. The policy commitment consequently remains distinct from a negotiated contractual prohibition.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
Section 3.1 of the Service Schedule for Docusign CLM, version 15 September 2025, keeps each stored document, including the customer data in it, for the subscription term or until the customer deletes it. The account administrator can set a different retention and deletion schedule. After the term, documents can be retrieved for 90 days through professional services, and Docusign may then delete them (3.2). The schedule covers stored documents rather than prompts as such.
AI output is Customer Confidential Information under the AI Attachment. The same attachment lets Docusign keep anonymized training data derived from content, with no duty to delete it. Docusign does not state what the Azure and Google model services keep from a prompt.
Customers can control how long uploaded agreements are stored, subject to legal requirements, and automatic purging of signed files is an available feature. The AI workflow separately promises not to retain a copy of the contract it reads. Those statements do not establish zero retention for the whole account or every generated clause and processing log. The default schedule, backup removal period and exact treatment of prompts and outputs are not specified for the AI service.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
CLM has its own permission model built on folders. A Docusign employee's guide on the Docusign Community sets out six levels. They run from No Access, the default for all content, through View, View and Create, View and Edit, and View, Edit and Delete, to full control with Set Access. Security can be set for a user, a permission profile or a user group. Folders inherit their parent's security unless it is set explicitly.
CLM administrators can see all content whatever the folder settings. The CLM page adds granular permissions controls and an audit trail of who did what and when. Docusign does not say how AI review, summaries or repository lookups apply folder permissions when they run.
Execution roles restrict which team members can authorize documents, and the privacy notice describes access approvals based on need to know. Reviewers and approvers can also be assigned to a particular contract. These controls support differentiated access in a corporate workflow. They do not explain whether repository permissions are reapplied to every AI request, how separate clients are isolated, or how a lawyer excluded from one matter is prevented from receiving its content in an answer.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Section 11.2 of the Master Services Agreement, version 14 November 2022, requires prompt written notice before a compelled disclosure of confidential information, unless legal process forbids it. It also requires cooperation in seeking a protective order. The Data Protection Attachment adds prompt notice of any government request about personal data. Docusign's law enforcement page says the company notifies customers when their data is subject to disclosure and withholds notice only under a signed nondisclosure order or a statute that bars it.
The page adds that Docusign cannot decrypt agreement contents at rest. Docusign prepares an annual transparency report on requests and makes it available to data protection authorities on request. The report is not published. Section 2(d) of the CLM Service Schedule says Docusign is not responsible for producing customer documents to any third party.
The privacy notice allows disclosure when courts or other competent authorities legally require it. It supplies no corresponding promise to notify the affected customer before complying, contest an overbroad request or provide a recurring transparency report. General notices about privacy policy changes address a different event. The standard service terms also permit freezing transactions for regulatory obligations without prior intimation, so that provision does not supply an advance warning commitment for compelled access either.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
CLM works from the customer's own contracts, templates and clause library, and does not retrieve case law or legislation. Docusign describes Iris, the engine behind it, as trained on decades of contract data. Section 6.1 of the AI Attachment lists the training data for Docusign's own models as customer data authorized for training, publicly available data and data licensed from third parties. Docusign warrants that to its knowledge it holds sufficient permissions for them.
The section names no specific source or license, and it excludes the data third party providers used for their own models.
The defined inputs are customer contracts and compliance rules configured by the legal team. Leegality does not identify a legal research collection, enumerate its authority sources or explain licenses for statutes, judgments or commentary used by the underlying model. Its separate guides to Indian electronic signatures are educational resources, not a declared retrieval corpus for AI Review. A clause suggestion can follow the customer's rule without establishing the provenance of any additional legal knowledge used to generate it.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
Docusign CLM manages a customer's own agreements and does not cite case law or legislation, so a citator is not part of the product. The CLM page, the AI-Assisted Review page and the AI Trust page do not address checking authority for later history. Docusign does not describe how CLM detects when an amendment or a policy change leaves extracted terms or clause library positions out of date.
A contract can be tested against a rule about governing law or another requirement, but no citator or judicial treatment service is identified. The interface's met, not met and not found labels describe compliance with the supplied checklist. They do not certify that a case remains good law or that a statutory requirement has not changed. Changes in law therefore need to be reflected in the team's rules and separately validated before a review result is treated as current legal advice.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
Section 6.2 of the AI Attachment warns that AI output may be incorrect or otherwise undesirable and makes the customer responsible for reviewing it. The AI Trust page describes content filtering for harmful outputs. Neither document says what AI-Assisted Review or the question and answer feature does when a playbook or the repository does not cover what is asked. Nor do they say how a doubtful extraction is marked before it feeds a report, a renewal alert or a workflow rule.
Docusign documents no path for CLM's AI features to decline an answer and publishes no confidence or grounding scores for extraction, review or summaries.
The review example labels a missing contractual requirement as not found and lets a reviewer dismiss suggested wording. That is useful handling of absent clauses, but it is not a model refusal policy. There is no described behavior for conflicting instructions, inadequate legal support, an unsupported jurisdiction or uncertain interpretation. Nor is a confidence measure accompanied by an escalation procedure for those circumstances. Human approval provides a workflow checkpoint while the model's response to insufficient knowledge remains unspecified.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin tracks court decisions worldwide that address hallucinated AI content and records the tool involved where known. It has no entry naming Docusign, Docusign CLM, Iris, SpringCM or Lexion, in the tool field or anywhere in the case text. CLM manages commercial agreements rather than producing court filings, so its output does not ordinarily reach a brief.
The October 16, 2026 review of the Charlotin database found no entry naming Leegality in either the AI tool field or the remaining case information. The product's main legal output is contractual language and rule analysis, rather than a court submission built from cited authorities. That use profile may affect how an incident would appear in a litigation database. Absence of a named case is not a measured accuracy result and does not establish that fabricated legal assertions cannot occur.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Section 6.2 of the AI Attachment for Docusign Services, which governs CLM's AI features, states that neither Docusign, the AI Services nor AI output provide the customer with legal advice. It makes the customer responsible for reviewing output for accuracy and suitability, including through human review. The CLM page, the AI-Assisted Review page, the AI Trust page and the agreements name no bar opinion, ethics rule or professional conduct guidance.
Docusign's compliance work covers data, security and sector regimes, including ISO, SOC, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, GovRAMP, DoD Impact Level 4, HIPAA and 21 CFR Part 11. Those regimes bind Docusign as a provider rather than a lawyer using the product.
The company explains Indian signature and documentation requirements and makes its software role distinct from a law firm. It does not connect AI Review's controls to a named bar opinion or a jurisdiction specific framework for lawyers' competence, confidentiality and supervision obligations. Banking and data protection compliance materials address separate regulatory duties. Configurable review approvals can assist a legal team's process, but the vendor does not map those features to professional conduct guidance for use of generative AI.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Enterprise legal, sales, procurement, and HR teams use CLM for their employer's agreements. Customer examples include T-Mobile Wholesale, Vestwell, and iCIMS, whose outcomes concern internal contracting speed and administrative effort. Vestwell reduced agreement package creation from 75 minutes to 5 minutes, while iCIMS attributes reduced legal intervention to its workflow. These are corporate operating costs rather than outside counsel invoices, and CLM does not specify a client fee adjustment for AI assisted work.
The published commercial relationship is a business purchasing document execution and contract operations services. Pricing is based on signatures, stamp papers and quoted business features, rather than recording a lawyer's time or allocating an AI expense to a legal client. Leegality identifies business, product and operations teams as its usual buyers alongside legal teams. Its claimed paperwork savings concern corporate operating costs. No client billing ledger, disclosure template or law firm fee allocation workflow is described.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
Docusign's subprocessor list, last updated 18 September 2026, is published as a web page and a download, with a separate section for CLM. It names each hosting supplier and each AI supplier against the feature it powers, with countries and a contact address. Changes go to an RSS feed, with an email route for objections. The Data Protection Attachment, the AI Attachment, the Master Services Agreement and the CLM Service Schedule are all published without a login.
The certifications page and the public CSA STAR CAIQ cover security. Together these documents name every model provider that touches CLM content, and a customer can forward them when its own clients ask about AI vendors.
The privacy notice names Amazon Internet Services, signature providers including CDSL and Protean, SHCIL, NeSL and WhatsApp Business, with their processing purposes. Some other categories remain generic, including SMS, payment and email providers. That supplies part of a procurement disclosure package but omits the model provider for AI clause review. Leegality also offers an information security questionnaire and audit rights through its enterprise arrangements. No prepared outside counsel AI disclosure package or complete legal client approval form is published.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
CLM keeps an audit trail of who did what and when, and detailed version control across drafts, so the history of a contract can be reconstructed. Docusign does not say whether an AI-Assisted Review suggestion, an AI drafted clause or an AI extraction is marked as machine generated in that history. Nor does it say whether the audit trail records which model produced it. It publishes no export built for disclosing AI involvement and no disclosure template.
CLM output is a contract, a report or an obligation record rather than a court filing. A record of AI involvement would most likely go to a counterparty, an auditor or a regulator.
Executed agreements receive a secure audit trail recording the signing journey, and the contract interface preserves reviewers, remarks and recent activity. Those records may help explain who approved or signed an agreement. They do not amount to an export showing which model generated a clause, the prompt used or how counsel verified the output. Leegality promotes the signing record for court use, but no separate AI use declaration or complete model provenance export is described for a filing.
The questions both sides leave open
Derived from the records above rather than written, so it cannot favor either vendor. Take these into both conversations and ask each side the same question.
- Good Law Verification
- Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
Which one fits
Choose Docusign CLM if
- Salesforce data needs to populate contracts and support an established sales contracting process.
- You need a broad set of configurable workflow steps across multiple agreement types.
- Procurement requires contract creation or updates to move between Coupa and the CLM.
Choose Leegality if
- Indian electronic stamping and Aadhaar signature options are essential parts of execution.
- Your reviewers need clause deviations and approval tasks alongside an existing Leegality signing operation.
- You want contract storage and AI processing explicitly confined to India.
In summary
Docusign CLM
Docusign CLM generates agreements from templates and business data, routes them through configurable workflows and stores completed contracts for analysis. AI supports clause review and extraction. Salesforce and Coupa connections extend the process into sales and procurement systems.
Leegality
Leegality connects AI clause review to document approvals, Indian signatures and stamp procurement. It also imports legacy contracts, extracts obligations and assigns reminders. The same agreement can be handled through its dashboard, Word extension or connected business application.
Questions buyers ask
Is Docusign eSignature the product being compared here?
The comparison concerns Docusign CLM, which includes generation, workflow, negotiation and repository functions. A standalone eSignature subscription has a different scope and price from that contract platform. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 16, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
What does Leegality add beyond signatures?
It supplies customer rule based review, suggested clause replacements, legacy contract imports and AI obligation extraction. The assessment by AI Legal Index treats these as identifiable legal AI features layered onto its execution service.
Can both products work with a CRM?
Docusign CLM describes Salesforce document generation and connected contracting. Leegality provides APIs for running document journeys from a CRM, loan system or HR application. The implementation work and supported data flow differ by connection. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 16, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which public price can be used for a full cost comparison?
Neither publishes an equivalent complete AI CLM price here. Leegality's Basic rates cover signatures and stamping; Docusign CLM is sold through a scoped sales proposal. Workflow, AI and integration requirements determine the comparison. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 16, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Neither vendor paid for inclusion, placement or a grade, and neither reviewed this page before it published. Everything on it comes from public material on the dates shown. How the index grades.
Standalone signature plans are distinct from the contract lifecycle products considered here. Regional execution requirements and integration scope can change the implementation cost.