Introducing Robert Wagner, Catylex's New Director of Growth

It started with a spreadsheet

My career in technology began almost by accident, in a small room at a large insurance company. I was a finance co-op student, assigned to help with the acquisition of another insurer. My job: a monthly reconciliation of their general ledger: Spreadsheet A against Spreadsheet B, roughly 20,000 lines, checked off one by one.

I knew there had to be a better way. So I taught myself Visual Basic and wrote macros that turned the entire monthly reconciliation into a single click.

Then I had a new problem. Everyone's hours were tracked, and I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. So I asked for more work. My managers kept handing me projects that involved adopting new technology, and I ended up working alongside the project managers and change managers who ran them.

That experience became the premise of my career: there is always a better way to do something. Whatever tools we have today, a better way keeps arriving, and it seems to arrive faster every year.

What legal teams taught me about change

More than a decade ago I moved into legal technology, joining viDesktop in Toronto, which sold HR and talent management software to AmLaw 100 and AmLaw 200 firms. Inside those firms I saw enormous room for process improvement. I also learned that great technology is only half the equation.

The people I was asking to change were some of the smartest, hardest-working professionals I had ever met. They knew their work, they had built their processes with care, and they were understandably skeptical of anyone promising a better way. They were also the people who decided what to buy and the people who had to use it. Change management mattered far more than I expected.

My finance training helped me see what sat underneath that resistance: incentives. In a law firm, people are motivated to produce more work product. When I moved to iManage and began working with corporate legal departments, the motivations shifted. In-house teams exist to protect the organization. They think about risk, obligations and continuity, and they evaluate every technology through that lens.

Later, at ClearyX, I saw the market from the service provider's side. I was exposed to a steady stream of RFPs in which in-house teams asked their providers to show exactly how technology was lowering costs and improving service. The appetite for change was clear, but progress was slower, because every step still ran through experienced people who were protective of their work and their value, and rightly so.

The common thread across all of these roles is the in-house legal team. I have always been drawn to how in-house teams can use technology to work more effectively with outside counsel, bring more work in-house, and save time and money. Each role showed me another angle on the same challenge.

Why Catylex

Many companies have tried to build a reliable data foundation from legal agreements. It’s a hard problem. Contracts of the same type still vary widely depending on who drafted them, when, and under what circumstances. Much of the market moved on to generative AI before that foundation was in place, and those tools often lack the context they need to deliver reliable answers.

Catylex took the problem on directly. The team combined several technologies with decades of legal expertise to build a platform that turns commercial agreements into structured, trusted data with minimal human supervision.

Two things stood out to me. The first is accessibility. With most tools, you still need legal expertise, IT expertise, prompting expertise, and someone still has to supervise the output before anyone can rely on it. Catylex removes most of that burden for in-house teams working with commercial contracts. A stretched legal department can get the core of what it needs with little specialist knowledge, in little time, at a sensible cost.

The second is the architecture. Many approaches extract data from contracts every time someone asks a question. Catylex extracts it once and stores it in a logical, accessible structure, so the work never has to be repeated. That structured layer becomes the data foundation for every other automation and AI tool an organization adopts. Trustable AI shows users how reliable each extracted data point is, which gives legal and business leaders decision-grade trust in what they act on.

If I had to explain my decision simply: Catylex puts contract intelligence in the hands of anyone in the business who needs it. That’s a powerful premise for any business to build from, and it’s clearly the better way.

What I bring

I describe myself as a connector of ideas. I tend to spot two things that others see separately and recognize that, working together, they can deliver far more than the sum of their parts. Then I turn that insight into a story. Change-resistant buyers respond when a complex idea connects to something familiar from their own working lives and they can picture the better outcome for themselves.

That shapes how I approach every customer relationship. Our customers already run document management systems and often several CLMs. They have invested in those tools and in the processes built around them. Catylex works alongside all of it as a platform-agnostic layer that gives them visibility across their entire contract portfolio. Teams keep what works and gain actionable intelligence they never had before. My job is to listen closely enough to show each organization where that value sits for them.

Looking ahead

The more technology we have, the more human connection matters. We have never had more ways to communicate, and what people want most is still to be in the room with the people they work with and understand what motivates them.

That kind of connection has faded as of late, but. I see it returning, and I believe it will matter for the rest of our careers. When everyone has access to the same tools and knowledge, what sets us apart is knowing why we do the work and whom it serves.

That is what I am here to build as Catylex's Director of Growth: relationships in which legal and business leaders trust us, trust their data, and use their contract portfolios to make better decisions across the enterprise. If your team is working to make sense of a fragmented contract portfolio, I would love to hear from you.