‘Don’t skate to where the puck is, but to where it will be,’ says James Clough, CTO and co-founder of Robin AI, as he explains the doc review specialist’s strategy to Artificial Lawyer.
Robin AI was certainly ready for what is happening now. He and fellow founder, Richard Robinson, started with the idea of using a team of subject matter experts, plus AI, to handle document review, and learnt a lot from the ML/NLP technology of the time in 2019. As genAI arrived, they quickly partnered with Anthropic to make full use of what LLMs could do. Since then they have not looked back.
So, where are they now? The UK-based company now has offices in London, New York, and a recently opened base in Singapore. Staff numbers are at about 175, and as Clough notes, they are now at the size where it’s not possible for him to know everyone. He mentions Dunbar’s number – the anthropological theory that humans cannot really know more than 150 people at one time as that was how we evolved.
Breaking this limit is always a special moment in a startup’s life, as it means it really isn’t just about the founders and their core team any longer: this is an expanding company, with a lot of people in it – and with many more hires to come.
London is still the main base with 130 of the total, but the US is growing fast, with around 40 people there with mostly a commercial focus, though with some engineering staff there too. Clough notes that most of their clients are in the US as well – which makes sense as it’s the biggest legal market on Earth.
Singapore, the new office, gives them coverage of the world’s main time zones and access to the Asia-Pacific markets. The aim is to get to 10 staff there ASAP. That will be helped by their $26m funding this January, with now over $40m invested in them so far.
In terms of what they offer, the focus as noted is around contract analysis and review, but they also provide reports on large-scale contract groups, as well as provide due diligence for M&A. Plus, although they work a lot with inhouse legal teams at corporates, they also work with PE funds, and law firms – including some smaller ones.
AI and People
When it comes to genAI’s arrival, Clough notes: ‘We were prepared for the things that came and it’s worked out well for us.’
And they were indeed one of the first legal tech companies to go heavily into genAI on the contract analysis side and were working with Anthropic as far back as 2022. It seems a bit unusual to put it in terms of ‘as far back as’, yet two years in legal genAI is a very long time. Just consider how far things have changed since then.
One aspect that Clough expands on is the use of their managed services group. Many legal tech companies – aside from those in CLM – try not to have a services / consulting aspect. But, Clough sees this human element, which works directly with clients, as a very useful benefit and differentiator.
First, clients like the fact they also have a human team; second, the contract review group in turn helps Robin to improve its AI offering.
As Clough explains: ‘You need data to build models and people can gloss over how you mark up a contract. There are many different tasks involved. With our own managed legal services we can capture these pathways.’
This site then asks about clients’ views on sharing information. Clough explains that they ‘only train where there are no risks of data leaking out’ and confidentiality is always maintained.
Besides, ‘clients are happy to be given the benefits’ of this improving offering, he adds.
Artificial Lawyer also asks whether the challenges of scaling the services part of the business, as opposed to scaling software sales, is a barrier? Clough says that the combination gives ‘you a unique advantage’ and that it resonates with the clients. I.e. it’s helping their growth and in what is an increasingly competitive market for legal tech in the age of genAI, having such an advantage – which also helps to improve the product – is really something they’re glad to have.
AI Agents
Clough, as with most other legal tech pioneers, sees the importance of AI agents when combined with what LLMs can do and believes we’re only just starting to see their value.
‘Agents will be a key next step. There should be a big shift,’ he says when discussing how use of genAI will change.
He notes that people don’t necessarily want to ‘retool their ways of working’ to ‘make room for AI’. I.e. AI needs to fit into how lawyers work, not the other way around.
But how?
One answer is to leverage agentic workflows, where instructions for a series of chained tasks are executed, tapping LLM skills and other tech along the way. I.e. where there are processes that are already mapped out that are formulaic, agents can be fitted to those tasks. In short, AI will fit right into the processes lawyers already have in place, rather than operate in addition to them, or adjacent to them.
Price of Legal Work
We get onto the subject of the future direction of legal genAI and the challenges it faces in a time-based system. Clough observes that the ‘unit cost of legal work is elastic’, i.e. an hour’s worth of a certain type of legal work for a lawyer at X level of experience is just a flexible price – so, production methods can change this. That is to say, although it always goes up, it could also come down.
‘What if legal review cost just $1? What if legal review was 1,000X cheaper than today?’ he muses.
And, one could argue we are getting there already – at least in theory. How much does it actually cost to run a genAI tool, that is hitting the accuracy levels you require, over a relatively mundane contract in order to find top-level information? If token costs drop massively in the years ahead and tech licence costs have been shared out across a major legal business….then what is the cost to the firm per document?
Of course, there is review and there is review. A very deep and thorough review, with lots of redlining, back and forth negotiation, and redrafting by top lawyers is another thing. But, a ‘quick once-over’? It feels like we are already at the ‘pennies on the dollar’ stage for that.
Will charging $500 for a quick doc review seem like charging $500 for using spellcheck in the years to come? I.e. shouldn’t this almost be free for the client? It will depend on the complexity level of the review that is required. But, if it does really start to feel like spellcheck, how long can law firms keep charging what they do, or at least keep charging using ‘time taken’ as a metric for defining value? Moreover, if costs do drop enormously, while accuracy improves (as it should), then the cost to inhouse teams in doing this work internally also disappears.
Law Firms
When asked about law firms, Clough says that they have a number of such clients still, and in fact several of them are smaller firms.
‘It’s a very competitive space for smaller law firms, they have to scrap for their work. So, using tech is a differentiator, while they also tend to do more fixed rates work,’ he says.
He adds that this is not their key focus, the main target is inhouse teams of big companies, but they will maintain their connection to ‘small law firms and experiment there’.
The Future
For a company that is expanding very rapidly already, when it comes to ‘the future’ the attention is on growing what they’ve just put in place, while also looking ahead to what can next be achieved with genAI. They’ll keep looking to where the puck is moving.
They will ramp up the offices across the world. They will continue to sell to the biggest corporates, whether that is insurance companies, pharma, or Big Tech, all of which ‘have their own niche needs’ Clough adds.
I.e. doing contract review for a pharma company will have very specific needs that are fitted to them, and so being able to provide specialised answers to their contract demands will be a big deal. But, they’re focused on doing that.
On the future product side they are exploring turning collections of a client’s information into a large data model, in effect ‘a huge table, which can then be analysed’. That will help the clients in multiple ways and has been supported by ever-growing LLM context windows, Clough adds.
All in all, there is a lot going on at Robin AI and they are very much at home in the world of generative AI. Growth is the key word at the moment and in that respect they are going to keep skating to where the puck is heading.
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Legal Innovators UK Conference – November 6 + 7, London.
Robin AI is one of many leading legal tech companies taking part in the Legal Innovators UK conference in London, Nov 6 and 7, where generative AI’s growing impact on the legal sector will be explored across multiple sessions, with Law Firms the focus of Day One, and Inhouse on Day Two.
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