Overview
Hartbeat's legal department was new when it set up Molten Cloud, and it did not start from a blank page. It inherited agreements that predated everyone on the team, and it needed one place where those agreements, and every new one, could be found, read and questioned.
On 24 September 2026, Vical Peterson Brunious, Attorney and Operations Leader at Hartbeat, walked through how the team uses Molten on the Molten Cloud webinar The Evolution of Legal Operations at Media Companies, alongside Molten Cloud founder and CEO Arjun Mendhi. This case study follows what she described, step by step, in her own words where possible.
A foundation built for later
Hartbeat works with a wide range of agreement types, and Molten holds a template for each one. Vical counted at least ten, from licences and distribution in and out to shopping agreements and production services agreements. When the templates were built with the Molten team, the aim was to track what the department would need later, not only what it needed on day one.
“We tried to be mindful of the types of things that we would want to track, even if it wasn't right then, but in the future, just to make sure that the foundation was set for us to be able to go in later and add in the information that we thought would be necessary.”
Vical Peterson Brunious, Attorney and Operations Leader, Hartbeat
The life of an agreement
Once an agreement is signed, sealed and delivered, it goes into Molten. The team uploads the executed agreement and lets the AI ingest take the first pass, parsing the information it can. A notification says when the agreement is ready for review.
The review opens on a summary. If the agreement covers a title that is not yet in Molten, the system flags it and adds the title, so nobody has to create it by hand. The team then goes through the terms that were populated, double checks them, and adds anything the AI did not fill in. The signed file is stored with the data, so the document and what was extracted from it stay together.
“Even if you don't have time to do that, at least the agreement is in there. So you can still search certain fields based on it, just on the AI ingest.”
Vical Peterson Brunious, Attorney and Operations Leader, Hartbeat
Rights you can read at a glance
Once an agreement is in, its rights are live. Vical described two ways to look at them: laid out in text, or from the titles view as a timeline of what is available across a timeframe. The team can also run an avails search and save it, to keep track of what is available and what is not.
Alerts before a right runs out
Expiry notifications are one of the ways Vical uses Molten most. On shopping agreements and option purchase agreements, an alert that a right is about to expire gives the team time to reach out for an extension, if the other party is amenable, or to check with the team on how the project is progressing.
The same alerts watch distribution. Hartbeat has content on different platforms, and a notice that a placement will be up in the next 90 days goes to the business team, so they can decide whether to keep the content there.
“It also gives them a chance to kind of reevaluate our agreements and where to continue and where not to.”
Vical Peterson Brunious, Attorney and Operations Leader, Hartbeat
Answering the question in front of you
Many of the requests that reach the team are questions about what the agreements say. Because every template field can be searched, the answer is usually a search. Vical's example: someone asks for every agreement with some sort of financial obligation, and she can pull them up and export them, with the terms showing whether it is a percentage, a revenue share or a fee, and what the payment terms are. The same approach answers whether an agreement is assignable, or which MSAs are expiring as the end of the year approaches, by searching on a field or on a date.
It works for drafting too. If someone on the team remembers drafting a point but not where, they can search for the agreement it came from and look at similar agreements before deciding how to draft the new one.
Keeping the department's memory
Because the department inherited agreements from before its time, the historical record matters as much as the new deals. When someone asks about an agreement that predates the whole team, it is in Molten, and the terms can be checked. Molten typically offers unlimited users, so new team members get access to the same knowledge base when they join.
“Having all that information, even just from a historical standpoint, has been very helpful.”
Vical Peterson Brunious, Attorney and Operations Leader, Hartbeat
Working with the Molten team
Getting searches and exports to return exactly the right information, on a contract basis or on a title basis, has been a joint effort. Asked whether she had worked with the Molten team on bespoke exports or reports, Vical answered: “They're probably sick of me.” Reports can now also be built and modified directly from the settings, with the Molten team stepping in when a request calls for a new type of report.
“Your team's always been super helpful with trying to help us learn and navigate within Molten.”
Vical Peterson Brunious, Attorney and Operations Leader, Hartbeat
The result
For Hartbeat, Molten is where an agreement goes the moment it is signed, and where the answer is found when someone asks about it later: which rights are expiring, what the terms say, what the team drafted before. The AI takes the first pass, the team keeps the review, and even an agreement that has not been reviewed yet can already be found.
Watch Vical and Arjun discuss legal operations at media companies in the full session: The Evolution of Legal Operations at Media Companies.
Watch the webinarThe Evolution of Legal Operations at Media Companies, full recording with Vical and Arjun
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