Hi! We're Recital's product development team.
We're an all-remote, collaborative, tight-knit, and cross-functional team building solutions for contract professionals to manage their contract negotiations.
We’re building a web app that brings standard development tooling to the world of contract negotiations, with features analogous to version control, diffs, and other common IDE features.
With us, you'll do more than build a product – you'll help redefine the contract negotiation experience with the support of a team who values skill development, openness, and a culture of inclusivity & belonging.
Sound like the experience you're looking for?
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Recital is a workspace for contracts professionals to manage their contract negotiations. It auto-organizes contract versions, enables reliable document comparisons in one click, and streamlines the negotiation process.
It works with the tools that contracts professionals already use every day, like Microsoft Word, email and cloud storage -- without requiring contracts professionals to change how they work. That means it can be adopted rapidly (within one day).
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We're an early-stage startup and this is our second startup in legal tech after the first was acquired.
We already have a small pool of early users using Recital for their contract negotiations and have validation from nearly one hundred other contracts professionals. Right now, our primary focus is improving the value our current users get from Recital by increasing adoption of the features our product offers and ultimately growing our user base in 2023.
Grow & Learn with Good People
We're a tight-knit team and are ever-conscious of what culture means to us.
Culture is really about the way we collectively behave, and when we talk about it as a team we consistently agree on the following "culture musts": trust, openness, speed, short feedback loops, experimentation, continuous improvement, documentation, delegation, and one-/two-way doors.
Our culture is one of belonging, and even though we may live in various areas of the world, we do what we can with the technology at hand to minimize the distance.
"As a manager, I value emotional maturity and soft skills over hard skills. I give frequent, small, objective feedback (I aim for 80% positive / 20% adjusting) and I have weekly 1-1s with each person on my team. I value continuous improvement and above all, trust and care about those I work with."
Brendan Mulholland, CTO
How We Work Together
We prioritize developer experience at the same level as user experience: they’re both essential to our business. We follow modern best practices for a product development team, like DORA metrics and continuous discovery.
We are a fully remote team & use technology that helps us move quickly.
We use tools like Notion, Slack, Tuple, and Tandem to stay in touch and keep things moving. We set four hours a day for our core hours (when everyone is online at the same time) so we can balance alignment and knowledge sharing with dedicated time for deep work at the time that works for each of us.
We embrace the Agile manifesto.
We reject scrum, use Linear for task management, and ship code to production on average ~4 times per developer per day. We strive for short cycle times and, while we still do PRs, use our judgment and a ship/show/ask framework to decide whether code reviews are needed before or after merge.
We're (mostly) self-directed.
We have a one-hour weekly team meeting where we talk about various topics and have daily 15-minute priority check-ins (these are not the typical "standup"), otherwise, you decide what you should be working on. This means being able to justify prioritization, which itself requires a good product sense and customer understanding (we expect our developers to talk regularly with our users).
We’re focused on continuous improvement.
We're focused on product discovery, being professional, and (measurable) engineering excellence (via DORA metrics).
What's it actually like working for Recital?
Check out these kind words from past and present team members about their experience working for Recital.
"As a place to continuously learn and grow, Recital has been top-notch for me. Compared to any other place I’ve worked, Recital’s genuine focus and effort put into developer happiness is also a breath of fresh air. We keep on top of technical debt, prioritize code quality, and always use the best tooling we can find to keep both processes and product running smoothly."
- Kent Mewhort, Principal Developer
"I had the good fortune to work with this team since 2015 across three different companies; these were the best years of my professional life. Coming from a radically different environment, at first, I had a bit of a culture shock adapting to being treated so nicely. If the stars aligned and you were offered the chance to work with this team, f-ing take it!"
- Dan Dimerman, Former Lead Backend Developer
Meet Our Team
Our team includes engineers, product design, and product management.
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder
Brendan is our technical co-founder & CTO, and manages the development team at Recital. He's been doing web development since IE 6, and has been working in the world of contract negotiation legal tech for a decade. He got his start in legal tech in 2013, joining Martin as the first full-time employee and lead developer. At Coupa, which acquired Contractually in 2016, he spent time in roles in product management and engineering for Coupa's contracts product.
Prior to Contractually, Brendan worked on cellphone electrical engineering at RIM/BlackBerry and holds a Bachelors in Engineering Physics from UBC. When he's not busy building the Recital product, Brendan enjoys travelling and is currently based in Berlin.
Brendan Mulholland
CEO & Co-Founder
Martin Ertl is founder and CEO of Recital. He is an active user of the Recital product, and remains highly involved in our product process. He previously started, grew & sold Contractually, a business software company that brought business contracts to the cloud. Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP) acquired Contractually, and Martin then spent three years as the General Manager of Coupa CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management), leading product management and sales to Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. Coupa is the market leader for helping businesses manage their spending.
Martin is a lawyer by background, having worked at DLA Piper, and has degrees from UBC (Physics) and McGill (Law).
Martin Ertl
Principal Developer
Kent is a Principal Developer at Recital, where drives architecture and development across the full tech stack. With over 15 years of professional development experience, and a law degree, Kent has a wealth of knowledge in the legal technology space. He has worked with Martin and Brendan at Contractually and managed Coupa's CLM development team.
In addition to his background in tech, Kent has also practiced law at the CIPPIC law and technology clinic at the University of Ottawa and developed software in the aerospace and telecommunications industries.
Kent Mewhort
Product Designer
Tiffany is our part-time interdisciplinary product designer at Recital. With expertise in visual design, wireframing, prototyping, UI/UX, and information architecture, Tiffany has designed products for enterprises, startups, and individuals.
She is skilled at creating deliberate brand experiences across brand, web, and product, and has led design on various product development and marketing teams. Tiffany also sits on the Digital Product Design Professional Advisory Council at Sheridan College. Tiffany believes in the power of essentialism and strives to understand the intent and purpose of a brand or product in order to communicate it with clarity.