‘There will be two types of lawyer, those who are enabled by AI and those who don’t do much work,’ Tramale Turner tells Artificial Lawyer.
Turner recently joined genAI pioneer Robin AI as its CTO, replacing co-founder James Clough who has gone on to Encord, a data curation startup. It’s fairly unusual for a CTO to leave just as a company is getting into its stride, but Turner is excited to take on the role and sees great growth ahead.
So, first question, how did you get to know contract review-focused Robin AI and its CEO Richard Robinson, who previously worked at Clifford Chance?
Turner explains that among other roles, he has been CTO of TaxBit, Head of Engineering at Stripe, and he has held leadership roles at Nintendo and Volkswagen Group, before recently deciding to look for a new challenge. He was introduced to Robinson, they hit it off, and the rest is history.
So, what about replacing the co-founder Clough? How has that been? ‘James wanted a different path,’ Turner notes and of course, the two never worked together, so for him Robin AI and legal tech is a whole new world. And one that he’s very excited about.
Immediately he targets the main challenge for corporates, as he sees it. ‘CLM has not broken through to be the de facto tool [for inhouse teams],’ he says and returns to a theme often shared by Robin AI: that inhouse legal teams need a genAI plus managed services provider, such as theirs, to handle their contracting needs – not a very large and complex to implement CLM system. And of course, the CLM companies may well have a different viewpoint.
He also notes that they continue to work with some law firms – something that most CLM companies avoid, in part because that’s not the best deployment of those platforms.
So, where is Robin AI now? It started in the UK back in 2019, played with various types of AI support, then saw genAI coming down the tracks and leapt into a relationship with Anthropic. Now the boss, Robinson, is based in the US, and they are on a major expansion drive after raising over $71m to date. In fact, the company has even hinted they’d like to do an IPO one day.
‘There is a great possibility for a successful exit, or acquisition. I don’t know which, but the progress is encouraging,’ Turner says.
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He also mentions that in 2023 their AAR was $4.3m, and it more than doubled in 2024 to $10m. Now, that may not sound like a huge amount, but there are a lot…..a lot….of well-known legal tech companies out there that still have not reached that number, or if they have then they are sometimes finding it hard-going to expand upon it, (yep…you’d be surprised…or maybe not).
Moreover, a doubling of revenue is a major achievement. Of course, that trajectory needs to keep on that path for a few more years yet before any kind of exit…or one would assume.
Turner adds that they have around 200 people now, most of whom are in the UK and that they have a ‘rich pipeline’ of potential clients ahead of them. Clients include GE, Pfizer, KPMG, and UBS. And they’re also seeking to build more partnerships with other businesses in the legal market, for example they hooked up with Dye & Durham.
But back to their model of having staff to provide a type of managed services offering. The old motto for tech companies is: consulting services don’t scale – and so most software providers try to avoid selling professional input, and instead focus on shipping out all the ones and zeros instead.
Turner likes the approach, however, and says: ‘We like to keep humans in the loop. They give a different kind of quality check before sending work back to the customers. It’s an assurance of high accuracy.’
He also noted that as Robin grows the internal managed services team won’t ‘scale linearly’ with it. ‘Tech is a force multiplier,’ he adds, i.e. they drink their own medicine.
As to the bigger picture and the shape of the market, Turner sees a vibrant ecosystem that is opening up to what AI can do.
‘There will be two types of lawyer, those who are enabled by AI and those who don’t do much work,’ he notes.
He also is welcoming of what this all means. ‘We expect lots of competitors, but lawyers won’t all be using the same tool for their work. [The legal tech market] is different to what happened with Microsoft Word: that’s a core utility,’ he says. ‘Legal is creative, so we expect maybe four or so large competitors and some smaller ones.’
Last word with regard to how he sees Robin AI fitting into all of this: ‘When I was introduced to Richard [Robinson] it didn’t take long to decide that this was the team I wanted to be with. Richard has a vision and it resonated with me. It was compelling.’
Good luck to Tramale, this site looks forward to seeing where Robin AI gets to.
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