Spellbook Rolls Out Compare to Market – AKA Contract Money Ball

Pioneering legal AI company Spellbook has rolled out its ‘money ball for contracts’ capability, Compare to Market, for all customers, which analyses key contract terms and contrasts them with real market data.

As explored in December’s AL webinar with CEO Scott Stevenson, the company firmly believes that the only way to avoid ‘AI slop’ is to bring quality data into the contracting process and then apply it in a very specific way.

Or as they illustrate: ‘Want to know what a typical liability cap looks like in a SaaS agreement? Or how your indemnity terms compare to standard healthcare software contracts? Now you’ll have the answer.’

Key to this approach is that Spellbook customers can share their contract data – anonymised and without any sensitive info, naturally – so that users can benefit from the results. (There are also other data approaches – see end of article.)

This is what it does and why it matters:

• ‘On launch, the tool will support 14 contract types and 15-20 deal points per contract, which will be improved and expanded with time.
• Compare to Market arms lawyers with objective proof from thousands of similar contracts. When the opposing party claims their terms are market, lawyers will have the facts ready to ensure clients get a fair deal.
• Spellbook captures only high-level statistical datapoints (like ‘average payment terms in SaaS agreements’), with no personally identifiable information.
• The data comes from a ‘give to get’ model where firms can share anonymized statistics to access the broader pool, though large organizations with sufficient deal flow can create their own private data silos (launching later this year), and firms that prefer not to contribute can pay for access instead. Users can also opt out of data collection entirely.’

And here is a short video of how it works:

In terms of the workflow, it goes like this:

• ‘Open any agreement in Word, select ‘Compare to Market’ and specify the agreement type, jurisdiction, and deal context you want to analyze.
• You’ll see where your agreement stands relative to thousands of similar contracts across dozens of deal points. These benchmarks never go stale because the data set supporting them continuously updates.
• Spellbook will also automatically highlight terms that are favorable or unfavorable to your party, helping you quickly determine where to focus your negotiating capital.
• Then you can drill into any deal point to view the full distribution of underlying data.’

CEO, Stevenson, commented: ‘Negotiation has largely been an exercise in intuition rather than analysis. Compare to Market changes this. It introduces a new, data-driven way to negotiate contracts, offering a real-time view of the private market that static databases and public filings can’t match.

‘For the first time, lawyers can arm themselves with objective benchmarks drawn from an always-updating pool of market data, and at the click of a button, reveal whether a term is favourable or unfavourable for their party.’

Is this a big deal? Yes. Why? Because although many companies are providing legal AI skills to review contracts, the ability to curate a quality data set and then leverage that ‘to money-ball’ your contracts (i.e. to study the data for insights into what’s best), elevates things.

AL especially likes the way that there is a community aspect here – with the potential for law firms and clients to help the entire ecosystem of customers with what is market by sharing contract information. One could perhaps see this as a ‘proto-Practical Law’, which is offered by Thomson Reuters.

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Where Does the Data Come From?

They will be offering 3 data models:

1. Give to Get: Combine aggregate statistical insights with the rest of our users in order to get access for free. This data is completely anonymous, and only contains facts like: ‘What is the average late payment interest rate in SaaS agreements?’
2. Pay to Get: Withhold your data from the pool, and get access to insights from the full pool, for an extra fee.
3. Siloed Data: Want statistical insights on your own private dealflow? We’ll be launching this later in 2026.

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More about Spellbook here.