David Smith

Chief Information Security Officer & Co-founder

Alongside Tom Dunlop, David Smith founded Summize to meet the needs of legal teams everywhere. With over 30 years of experience in the IT and software development industry, David brings deep technical expertise and a practical, business-first mindset to Summize. Before co-founding the company, he worked at AppSense (later LANDESK and Ivanti), where the original idea for Summize first took shape.

Today, as Chief Development Officer, David focuses on making sure that Summize’s engineering function, CLM infrastructure and platform can scale reliably as the company grows.

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Hear from David!

Get to know more about David, his career and what it means to be the CISO at Summize, in our video.

David, tell us about your career history and expertise

I started working with computers back in 1992, which feels like a long time ago now. My first role was in an in-house IT team, writing software in COBOL to support core business functions like sales orders, stock control and invoicing. That early experience gave me a really solid understanding of how businesses actually operate, because the software touched so many different departments.

From there, I moved across a number of companies and roles, working both in in-house IT teams and in software houses. Over the last 30-plus years, I’ve worked with a wide range of programming languages (COBOL, C Sharp, Angular and Terraform, to name a few) and technologies, and I’ve seen the industry evolve from mainframe computers that filled entire rooms to cloud-based platforms you can run from a laptop.

Over that time, my roles progressed from junior developer to senior developer, architect and then into managing teams, which has been a steady progression to where I am now.

Tom Dunlop

CEO and Founder

Seeing how far Summize has come is still slightly surreal at times. From our first “office” in Starbucks Birchwood to now teams and offices across Manchester, Boston and San Diego.

What made you want to co-found Summize and build the technology behind it?

Summize really started as a technical challenge. While, our now CEO, Tom Dunlop and I were working together, he asked me one afternoon whether it was possible to take a contract, break it down into sections and reliably extract specific information from it. At the time, that was far from straightforward.

What does it mean to be the CDO at Summize?

For me, being Chief Development Officer (CDO) is about making sure engineering is functioning properly, and that the application and infrastructure can be support day-to-day. A lot of it is operational – keeping things running, taking in feedback and making sure the team has what it needs.

We have a good balance across the leadership team. Richard Somerfield, our Chief Technology Officer, is very strong on the product side and the development work that goes with that, and our roles complement each other well. Between us, we cover both the strategic and practical sides of building and running our contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform.