John O'Melia, CEO, left, and Ulf Zetterberg, executive vice-chairman, right, of Seal Software.

Artificial intelligence-based contract analytics and discovery provider Seal Software announced today it's moving company CEO Ulf Zetterberg to executive vice chairman, a newly created role focused on understanding consumer needs and expanding Seal's use in legal outsourcing and other use cases. Zetterberg's former position will be filled by John O'Melia, who had held the worldwide field operation executive vice president position before being promoted.

As CEO, O'Melia will handle the day-to-day operations for the company. He also said he will “look at the company end-to-end and make sure there is clarity about what our opportunities are and make sure [we] are executing it.”

O'Melia noted that before joining Seal in 2017, he had 20 years of experience managing worldwide services and customer success for Dell's EMC enterprise content division before the content management services platform was acquired by OpenText.

Currently, Seal's artificial intelligence-powered platform provides contract analytics, discovery and data extraction. Noting the “tremendous business” legal outsourcing companies pick up, Zetterberg said he aims to build an ecosystem of partners to help expand Seal's use in legal outsourcing and identify various other use cases for the platform. Both Zetterberg and O'Melia said the company's success hinges on their technology bringing value to clients' work.

It's about “how can we find an impact in their existing organization and technology,” Zetterberg noted. Additionally, he added that the company must ensure the “customer has multiple avenues to look at how to deploy Seal.”

This recent C-suite move comes after Seal added a few new members to its ranks last year. In 2018, the company hired former pharmaceutical executive Dave Pasirstein as vice president of pharma, life sciences and health care, and also added former Google senior program manager of legal technology Julian Tsisin as its vice president of legal markets.

That same year, the company also closed on a $30 million investment from venture capital firm Toba Capital and acquired analytics company Apogee Legal.

More recently, Seal received a $15 million investment in March from e-signature company DocuSign, with whom it has a partnership. Both companies said at the time that the investment would enhance intelligence and AI capabilities in DocuSign's Agreement Cloud suite of digital agreement software, which Seal's technology currently powers.

As Seal focuses on extending its market, it appears many corporate legal departments are hungry for more outsourced capabilities.

In-house legal operation leaders are eyeing long-term outsourcing to handle legal work, according to a recent Legaltech News article. After legal operations meets its process improvement and technology adoption goals, its upkeep will likely be outsourced to keep head count and budgets low, some legal ops leaders said.

An EY survey released last month also highlighted that in an effort to attract junior in-house employees, corporate legal departments are outsourcing “menial” tasks, including contract management, entity management and document retention.