New York-based SmartEsq has rolled out multiple new capabilities designed to help private funds teams manage the legal lifecycle ‘in one connected environment’. The company was co-founded by Esther Chiang in 2025, who previously worked at Paul Hastings and Kirkland & Ellis.
Last year, Chiang told AL that creating a large PE fund can involve 2,000 hours of work. With her startup this can be reduced to 400 hours – or an 80% drop – and give a 75% reduction in legal costs. The Summer 2026 release now expands upon the platform’s skills.
Plus, (see below), in a blog post by Chiang from June, the legal tech founder provides a strong view on Kirkland’s plans to develop their own AI system: ‘The $500 Million Walled Garden: What Kirkland’s Palantir Deal Actually Means for Private Equity‘.
In the blog post on her site, she notes: ‘If you swap out the Kirkland and Palantir logos, the feature list is an almost verbatim reflection of the pitch deck [of] my company.’
Among the new features released this August is a new Fund Lifecycle and Task Tracker that organizes the work required to form and close a fund. Each stage can be broken into assignable tasks, supported by strategy-specific checklists, bulk actions and a document registry that links files and investor deliverables to the work that produced them, they said.
Also new is an Obligations and Compliance Register that extracts ongoing commitments from side letters and fund documents and converts them into a working system of record. Teams can see which investor each obligation applies to, assign responsibility, set reminders, attach evidence and preserve a complete audit trail, they added.
SmartEsq has also expanded ‘Sandra‘, its legal assistant, to work across individual files or an entire fund. Sandra draws from a precedence-aware view of fund documents and provides citations linked directly to the source material. Users can move from an answer to the relevant page in a PDF or Microsoft Word document, and conversations are saved so complex work can continue across sessions.
And here’s an overview of all the updates:
- ‘A redesigned home dashboard with personal work queues, fund cards and portfolio views.
- A new fund-level navigation experience with project settings and faster page performance.
- Browser-based document preview for PDF and Microsoft Word files.
- Inline editing for NDAs and Transfer Agreements with tracked changes enabled by default.
- A redesigned Fund Overview with editable key terms and source-linked LPA Review Memoranda.
- A fund-level investor roster with import, export and editing capabilities.
- An integrated MFN election workflow for reviewing documents, preparing election forms and generating redlines.
- Expanded document generation for term sheets, side letters, transfer agreements and legal memoranda using existing project files.
- Platform-wide improvements to monitoring, reliability, security and performance.’
CEO Chiang commented: ‘The private funds market is moving beyond point solutions. Legal teams do not need another tool that reviews one document at a time. They need a connected system that helps them manage the work across documents, investors, obligations and teams, and allows that knowledge to remain with the client.
‘Much of the risk in private funds does not arise during drafting. It arises later, when obligations are spread across side letters, closing sets, spreadsheets and individual inboxes. Our goal is to make those commitments easier to identify, assign and manage before something is missed.’
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P.S. Esther Chiang also recently published a think piece on the company website all about Kirkland & Ellis’s AI plans. Here’s an excerpt below, their full article is here.
‘The $500 Million Walled Garden: What Kirkland & Ellis’s Palantir Deal Actually Means for Private Equity
‘When the news broke … that Kirkland & Ellis is partnering with data analytics giant Palantir to build a proprietary AI platform for private fund formation, my phone immediately lit up.
The press release was certainly ambitious. It detailed a system specifically designed to handle complex fund documentation, manage side letter generation, track LP compliance obligations, and orchestrate continuation vehicles. Reading it, I couldn’t help but smile. In fact, if you swap out the Kirkland and Palantir logos, the feature list is an almost verbatim reflection of the pitch deck [of] my company, SmartEsq, has been demoing to the Am Law 20 over the past year, including Kirkland, A&O and Freshfields.
We’ll take it as a flattering compliment. Some might view an elite mega-firm pouring resources into an AI platform alongside a tech titan as an existential threat to legal tech startups. But for those of us building specialized, vertical AI for the $50 trillion private capital ecosystem, this announcement isn’t a competitive threat—it is the ultimate, nine-figure market validation.
Kirkland & Ellis just spent a fortune to bake its senior partner judgment into a proprietary AI platform. In doing so, they ran a massive market education campaign on behalf of every fund formation AI startup in the space. They have definitively answered the question of whether generative AI can handle the high-stakes, nuanced reality of private equity. The answer is yes, and it is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
But there is a catch—and it is the exact reason why independent vertical AI platforms are about to dominate this market.
The defining characteristic of the Kirkland-Palantir platform is that Kirkland is building it for Kirkland. Explicitly, Palantir cannot sell this specific fund-formation iteration to other firms. It is a walled garden, designed to entrench the firm’s market dominance.’…..(continued on their website.)
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More about the company here.
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Two Major Legal Innovators Conferences this November
Come and join us in New York and London this November at Legal Innovators!
Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5
And, then Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18.
After another fantastic Legal Innovators California, where we had speakers from OpenAI, Y Combinator, Google, Meta, and many more pioneering organisations; and our stellar inaugural event in Paris this June, we are now looking forward to the landmark conferences in London and New York, both in November, and both across two days: Law Firm Day, and Inhouse Day.
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