The creator of words, a fledgling Scottish legal tech startup, has someway managed to attract the backing of two high-profile enterprise capital firms. The startup is aimed at in-house legal teams and law firms with an AI platform that they’ll configure to help other employees in the company. This way, anyone in the company can request help with legal tasks, similar to reviewing contracts and answering specific questions about the document.
Registered in October last 12 monthsThe Edinburgh-based company is the brainchild of former TravelPerk senior executives Ross McNairn (CEO) i Robbie Falkenthal (COO) together with the CTO Volodymyr Giginiak, who has held various engineering positions at Microsoft, Facebook and Instagram. Six months after leaving his previous positions, Wordsmith has already landed high-profile clients similar to Trustpilot while also working with at least one major law firm – FOR Piper.
This early initiative attracted the attention of worldwide VC firm Index Ventures, which, along with General Catalyst and Gareth Williams, founder and former CEO of Scottish technology company Skyscanner, invested $5 million in Wordsmith.
The proven fact that such a young Scottish startup has secured the backing of two VC firms that have jointly invested in corporations similar to Facebook, Slack, Sonos, Airbnb, Stripe and Snap speaks not only to Wordsmith’s previous guarantees, but also to the pedigree of the founders. Before TravelPerk, McNairn founded a travel management startup called Dorsai Travel. He sold it to Skyscanner just nine months after launch and became Skyscanner’s head of product. He then joined one other unicorn used shopping app LetGo before landing at TravelPerk.
Moreover, McNairn is also a qualified lawyer, a occupation he left after a few years to turn into a software engineer.
Legally liked
Things are hot in the legal tech space. In the last six months alone, several “co-pilots for lawyers” have emerged, similar to Harvey AI in the US and Brightness in the UK Other legal tech startups similar to Definitely and Lawhive in the UK collected decent places in the seed rounds and Series A, similar to Alexi (Canada) i Leya AI (Sweden).
These corporations cover the legal sector from different perspectives and regional touchpoints, but they have one thing in common: they are all riding the wave of generative AI.
As with other paper-heavy sectors, legal eagles they are looking for ways automate repetitive, labor-intensive work so they’ll focus on more strategic tasks. This is where Wordsmith enters the fray, providing a so-called “lawyer-in-the-loop” generative AI platform.
One sec Harvey A.I is aimed at lawyers themselves, Wordsmith is aimed more at the firm’s employees, and legal teams arrange the platform behind the scenes, connecting it to all their very own data sources. Lawyers are available if needed.
McNairn compares it to something like TravelPerk, which provides SMEs with a self-service business travel management platform that permits managers to define policies and approval processes. Employees make all their bookings inside these parameters.
“One of the biggest steps at TravelPerk [we made] was that we went from trying to speed up the travel team by selling them slightly better tools to enabling the rest of the company to book themselves,” McNairn told TechCrunch. “And then the travel team just administered, checked and made sure it was calibrated accurately. And this shift to building tools just for a given function, slightly than building tools that allow the remainder of the company to run more efficiently, is a huge shift in the way we work.
Firms can arrange Wordsmith in two basic ways: as an autopilot for simpler matters that do not require expert supervision, and as a co-pilot so that the lawyer is all the time up to date and can consent before issuing any formal responses.
A typical workflow might involve someone in sales who needs to analyze a latest contract or perhaps procurement, trying to close a deal, and who needs access to information similar to the company’s security posture – the kinds of questions that are fairly standard and unanswered slightly not much will change. By asking Wordsmith questions, anyone can get the information they need.
Other potential use cases may include issuing a personal data access request (SAR) to a company, with corporations in some jurisdictions being legally obliged to honor SAR requests. In this case, Wordsmith will be configured to accept tickets and connect to the company’s ticketing system, then respond with the requested information or a response template specifying timelines and next steps – no matter the company’s internal guidelines and processes.
Model behavior
Wordsmith uses a combination of core large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude.
“We use the right one for the job,” McNairn said. “Some are really good at analyzing things like the logic in legal contracts, and some are really good at helping us change the language with extreme precision. Claude is excellent at rationalizing problems and OpenAI (GPT-4) is just incredible, with different dimensions.
Enterprises have shown some concerns about adopting generative AI, which McNairn says the company is trying to approach in alternative ways. This includes allowing corporations to stipulate that their data does not leave the EU. It also guarantees that it is going to not train its artificial intelligence on company data. Wordsmith sets up a “private instance” for enterprises, which suggests it connects to the data wherever it resides (e.g. Google Drive or Notion) to refine the answer using the company’s own data, but that data is not used to train the model for other corporations.
“We use a technique called RAG (search augmented generation),” McNairn said. “So we don’t train on their data – we just use it when necessary. We bring it up, we use it to enrich the answer, and then we give them the answer.”
High frequency
While Wordsmith’s initial focus will likely be on strengthening in-house legal teams, the company is also looking at partnering with law firms, as evidenced by its early partnership with DLA Piper. In this case, DLA — a billion-dollar global legal powerhouse — is co-creating AI agents in partnership with Wordsmith, with the goal of distributing them to its clients.
As a result, they convey their very own technical expertise to improve Wordsmith in very specific areas of law. It could turn into something they might sell as a latest form of legal service, possibly at a lower rate.
“There’s a higher frequency and lower cost to using companies’ knowledge this way, rather than paying thousands of dollars an hour,” McNairn said. “His [also] this is a much higher way to show that they are progressive and want to implement AI.”
This business model may go particularly well for small and medium-sized law firms, where Wordsmith may very well be hired to acquire larger positions or take on more clients.
McNairns says that while the offering is still in the early stages of development with DLA, Wordsmith will likely bring it to market soon. “It’s just not there yet,” he said.
McNairn says that with $5 million in the bank, Wordsmith will now speed up hiring in each Scotland and the US. The company currently employs nine staff and while some are based in London and/or are in the means of being promoted, McNairn says he is keen for Edinburgh to turn into the company’s center of gravity.
“It’s an ecosystem issue that I’m very passionate about,” he said. “There have been three unicorns I’ve been involved in and now I just want to build something cool in Scotland.”