Legal genAI pioneer, Spellbook, is forming a close integration with Thomson Reuters’ Practical Law contract database, allowing users to tap both systems while drafting. The listed legal tech giant’s Ventures arm is also an investor in Spellbook, it’s worth adding.
Thomson Reuters (TR) and the Canada-based startup said that lawyers will be able to ‘pair access to thousands of Thomson Reuters Practical Law’s attorney-editor created standard documents and clauses with Spellbook’s AI drafting capability’, allowing them to rapidly implement tailored content based on specific needs ‘directly within Spellbook’.
When asked by Artificial Lawyer how this came about Spellbook CEO, Scott Stevenson, said: ‘When TR Ventures invested in us in 2023, we dreamed of one day making an integration between Spellbook’s copilot for transactional lawyers and TR’s Practical Law content. Today’s that day. Their team has been incredible to work with.’
Meanwhile Joe Dormani, a partner at TR Ventures, added: ‘AI continues to revolutionize how lawyers everywhere can leverage the latest technology to focus on meaningful, important work, and by integrating Practical Law content into Spellbook, we are continuing to push the advancement of the profession.’
So, is this a big deal? Yep, for sure. When it comes to leveraging genAI effectively data is golden, and no more so than in the field of the law. This is why Harvey had a chat with vLex over the summer – they wanted that lovely horde of case law data and more. And so for Spellbook, which is all about contracts and drafting, connecting directly into Practical Law – a huge database of example contracts and clauses – gives the startup a real turbocharge.
The move also does something else that’s very interesting. TR has its own drafting capabilities via what has been called ‘CoCounsel Drafting’, which as one would expect is also integrated deeply into Practical Law. Spellbook to some extent is a competitor to this capability. But, as noted above, TR Ventures also has a stake in Spellbook. So, in effect TR is providing highly useful support to another business in an area where it’s developing its own products.
Now, TR has built plenty of relationships with a lot of independent legal tech companies over the years, but this one really stands out given how vital genAI is now to TR’s future growth strategy in the legal sector.
The next question everyone will inevitably ask will be: is this the initial step towards an M&A deal? Well, first, because TR is a public company they are limited in what they can say about future plans, especially around acquisition strategies. Also, just because a large legal tech company is buddies with a smaller one doesn’t guarantee things will get closer all of a sudden.
For example, when Evisort did an alliance with CLM giant Icertis it looked like it might be a precursor to a full deal, but in the end Evisort went on to sell to Workday. Moreover, as Spellbook grows there is no reason that it has to do anything other than keep on expanding its market share and building out new features.
The contrary argument is that TR has been acquisitive on the genAI front, buying Casetext last year, then LLM developer Safe Sign in August this year, followed by the purchase of agentic AI business Materia (albeit that one is focused on the accounting sector) earlier this month. Plus, they’re already a shareholder in Spellbook via the Ventures arm. So……not beyond the realms of reasonable possibility that things get more serious at some point in the future.
But, we will see. Either way, Spellbook with TR’s enormous contract database on tap is a big step for genAI drafting.