Thrive Market Shows How Intelligent Agreement Management Fuels Growth for Lean Legal Teams
Thrive Market, a membership-based online healthy grocery store, is scaling rapidly despite limited resources by using AI-powered Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM).
Thrive Market is on a mission to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable for everyone, and it’s doing it at scale.
“Accessibility for us is about much more than just price; it's about reaching people wherever they are and connecting them with curated, emerging brands,” says Wade Johnson, Associate General Counsel at Thrive Market. “That’s what makes us unique. And we’re proving that profitability and purpose can coexist. Our company hit more than $900 million in revenue last year.”
To keep pace with this rapid growth, Johnson’s legal team has embraced AI for contract intake, empowering the function to “execute supplier contracts as quickly as possible to stock our virtual shelves.”
Why contract intake bottlenecks hamper growth and revenue capture
For growth companies like Thrive Market, the legal function plays a critical role in supporting mission and purpose.
Yet, contract intake often requires multiple emails among suppliers, business staff, and legal. Each department stores its contracts independently, making it challenging for legal and business staff to track agreements as they move through the process. In many cases, legal has to get involved every time a new contract is generated or revised.
“Our core challenge is to support Thrive Market’s massive company growth while maintaining a lean legal team of just three attorneys,” Johnson says. “Our mandate was to find ways to do more with less.”
How Thrive Market eliminated friction with Docusign IAM
Thrive Market simplified its contracting process with the Docusign IAM platform, which enables the legal team to centralize its entire legal operations, effectively removing manual bottlenecks and the need for email-heavy intake.
The IAM platform integrates with more than 1,000 apps that legal departments already use (including Salesforce and Microsoft), and can automate multi-step workflows from contract intake to drafting and electronic signing.
Thrive Market leveraged IAM to create three new self-service workflows, with the automated handling of routine NDAs and influencer agreements delivering the highest impact.
“Eighteen months ago, our most common request was a one-liner: ‘I need an NDA on our standard form,’" Johnson says. “This is simple work, but it would sit behind complex commercial redlines in the same email queue, and the requester had no idea anyone had even picked it up. So, they'd ping and re-ping [the legal department] asking for status updates.”
Today, that same NDA request runs as a self-serve workflow, allowing an NDA to be generated, signed, and returned to the requester within a day. Legal can now execute multiple NDAs and influencer agreements each day—work that used to take multiple days.
That’s just one use case. Here are a few other benefits Thrive Market is seeing:
Merchandising and finance teams have full transparency into contract status, including renewals
All legal requests now route through a centralized email and automatically generate a request in the IAM platform
Revisions happen directly within the platform via a Microsoft Word plugin
Every contract draft, communication, and executed agreement lives in one central repository, searchable by department for ease of access and renewal management
The result? A legal function that operates more like a product than a service—one with defined workflows, transparent status, and scalable capacity.
These successful results led to Thrive Market being named a 2026 Docusign Customer Awards winner in the Champions of Operations category. The company centralized its legal operations with Docusign to eliminate email-heavy intake and manual bottlenecks. Automated workflows dramatically reduced contract turnaround times, and teams across the company now use a searchable repository to track renewals.
"Contracts close faster, teams track renewals without chasing them down, and everyone finds what they need in one place," Johnson says. "This is what lets a three-person legal team punch far above its weight."
Looking forward: Incorporating agentic AI into contract management
Johnson sees agentic AI as the future of legal contract negotiation. The technology, designed to reason and act independently of human intervention, has already proven effective at executing multi-step workflows quickly and accurately. Within the context of contract lifecycle management, agentic AI represents a great leap forward.
“Our roadmap is entirely focused on leveraging agentic AI to redefine our work, specifically by eliminating the repetitive tasks no human being should be doing anymore, like moving data between spreadsheets,” Johnson says. “IAM is the engine and anchor that helps us achieve this vision.”
When asked what advice he would give legal departments considering adopting the latest AI capabilities to streamline workflows and remove bottlenecks, he answers quickly: “Do it, and do it now.”
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