Wordsmith, a fledgling Scottish authorized tech startup, has one way or the other managed to draw the backing of two well-known enterprise capital companies. The startup targets in-house authorized groups and legislation companies with an AI platform that they will configure to assist different employees within the firm. This fashion, anybody within the firm can solicit assist with authorized duties corresponding to reviewing contracts and answering particular questions on a doc.
Integrated in October final 12 months, the Edinburgh-based firm is the handiwork of former senior TravelPerk executives Ross McNairn (CEO) and Robbie Falkenthal (COO), alongside CTO Volodymyr Giginiak, who served in varied engineering roles at Microsoft, Fb, and Instagram. Six months after leaving their earlier positions, Wordsmith already claims notable clients, corresponding to Trustpilot, whereas it’s partnering with at the least one main legislation agency — DLA Piper.
This early traction has garnered the eye of international VC agency Index Ventures, which has led a $5 million seed funding into Wordsmith alongside Basic Catalyst and Gareth Williams, founder and former CEO of Scottish tech unicorn Skyscanner.
That such a younger Scottish startup has secured the backing of two VC companies which have collectively invested within the likes of Fb, Slack, Sonos, Airbnb, Stripe, and Snap, speaks not solely to Wordsmith’s early promise, but additionally the founders’ pedigrees. Previous to TravelPerk, McNairn based a journey administration startup referred to as Dorsai Journey. He offered it to Skyscanner simply 9 months after launch and have become Skyscanner’s head of product. He then joined one other unicorn, second-hand procuring app LetGo, earlier than touchdown at TravelPerk.
On prime of this, McNairn can also be a professional lawyer, a career he left after a few years to turn out to be a software program engineer.
Legally fond
The authorized tech area is scorching. Previously six months alone we’ve seen a number of “co-pilot for lawyers” emerge, corresponding to Harvey AI within the U.S. and Luminance within the U.Okay. Different authorized tech startups, corresponding to Definely and Lawhive within the U.Okay., have raised first rate seed and Sequence A rounds, as have Alexi (Canada) and Leya AI (Sweden).
These corporations are tackling the authorized sector from varied angles and regional focal factors, however they’ve one factor in frequent: they’re all driving the generative AI wave.
As with different paperwork-heavy sectors, authorized eagles are looking for methods to automate repetitive, labor-intensive work, in order that they will give attention to extra strategic duties. That is the place Wordsmith enters the fray, offering what it calls a “lawyer-in-the-loop” generative AI platform.
Whereas Harvey AI is concentrating on legal professionals themselves, Wordsmith is aimed extra at staff inside an organization, with authorized groups configuring the platform behind the scenes by connecting it to all their very own information sources. Legal professionals stay obtainable when wanted.
McNairn attracts comparisons to one thing like TravelPerk, which provides SMEs a self-serve enterprise journey administration platform that permits managers to outline the insurance policies and approval processes. Staff do all their very own bookings inside these parameters.
“At TravelPerk one of the big steps [we made] was that we went from trying to speed up the travel team by selling them slightly better tooling, to basically enabling the rest of the business to self-book,” McNairn instructed TechCrunch. “And then the travel team just administrated, checked, and made sure that it was calibrated correctly. And that shift of building tools just for the function, instead to building tools for the rest of the business to work more effectively, is a huge change in how you work.”
Corporations can configure Wordsmith in two core methods: as an autopilot for easier issues that don’t want knowledgeable oversight, and as a co-pilot whereby a lawyer is at all times within the loop to offer their seal of approval earlier than any formal responses are offered.
A typical workflow would possibly contain somebody in gross sales needing to scrutinize a brand new contract, or maybe procurement making an attempt to shut a deal and who wants entry to data corresponding to the corporate’s safety posture — the sorts of questions which are pretty normal and the place the responses aren’t prone to change a lot. By querying Wordsmith, anybody can get the required data.
Different potential use instances would possibly embody somebody issuing an organization with a topic entry request (SAR), whereby companies in sure jurisdictions are legally obliged to honor requests associated to private information entry. On this occasion, Wordsmith might be configured to simply accept a submission and connect with an organization’s ticketing system, and reply both with the requested data, or with a template response outlining timescales and the subsequent steps — no matter an organization’s inner tips and processes dictate.
Mannequin conduct
Wordsmith makes use of a mixture of foundational massive language fashions (LLMs), together with OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude.
“We use the right one for the job,” McNairn mentioned. “Some are really good at analyzing things like logic within legal agreements, and some are really good at being extremely precise on helping us to change language. Claude is very good at rationalising through problems, and OpenAI (GPT-4) is just all round fantastic, with different dimensions.”
Enterprises have proven a little bit trepidation at embracing generative AI, which McNairn mentioned the corporate is addressing in numerous methods. This consists of permitting corporations to stipulate that their information doesn’t depart the EU. It additionally guarantees to not prepare its AI on corporations’ information. Wordsmith configures a “private instance” for enterprises, which means it connects in to information wherever it’s (e.g. Google Drive or Notion) to enhance a response utilizing an organization’s personal information, however this information isn’t used to coach the mannequin for different corporations.
“We use a technique called RAG (retrieval augmented generation),” McNairn mentioned. “So we’re not training on their data — we’re just using it when it’s necessary. We recall it, use it to enrich the answer, and then give them a response.”
Excessive frequency
Whereas enhancing in-house authorized groups will probably be Wordsmith’s core purpose initially, the corporate can also be seeking to work with legislation companies, as evidenced by its early tie-up with DLA Piper. On this occasion, DLA — a worldwide billion-dollar authorized powerhouse — is co-developing AI brokers in partnership with Wordsmith, with a view towards distributing this to its personal clients.
So in impact, they’re inputting their very own technical data to enhance Wordsmith for very particular authorized domains. It may turn out to be one thing that they will promote on as new sort of authorized service, presumably at a decrease charge.
“It’s higher frequency and lower cost to engage with firms’ knowledge in this way, rather than paying thousands of dollars an hour,” McNairn mentioned. “It’s [also] a much better way to show they are progressive and looking to adopt AI.”
This enterprise mannequin may work notably nicely for small-to-midsize legislation companies, the place Wordsmith might be engaged to seize greater jobs or tackle extra purchasers.
McNairns says that whereas this providing continues to be in its early design levels with DLA, Wordsmith will possible commercialize this quickly. “It’s just not there yet,” he mentioned.
With $5 million within the financial institution, McNairn says that Wordsmith will now speed up its hiring each in Scotland and the U.S. The corporate counts 9 staff immediately, and whereas some are primarily based in London and/or within the means of shifting up, McNairn says he’s eager to make Edinburgh the corporate’s heart of gravity.
“It’s the ecosystem thing I’m quite passionate about,” he mentioned. “There have been three unicorns that I’ve been part of before this, and I just want to build something cool in Scotland.”
