The AI-native legal tech company Spellbook has rolled out a new tool to help firms handle the entire contract lifecycle. Billed as the first “end-to-end AI for enterprise agreements,” its Autonomous Contract Management (ACM) operates across three workflows: intake, review, and insight.

In a press release, the company notes that ACM will match the new speed of business and sidestep the bottlenecks that have affected other contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems that focus solely on storing and routing contracts. In-house legal teams are often left with “an expensive filing cabinet” that fails to deliver promised efficiencies, with little change in how contracts are actually handled. Scott Stevenson, Co-Founder and CEO of Spellbook, said: “We built Spellbook from the AI layer up so the work happens in the background, and lawyers wake up to a queue that's already been handled." ACM works across the full contract lifecycle. It autonomously pulls in new contracts from email, Slack, and other tools, runs a first-pass review against a team's standards before a lawyer opens them, and routes each one to the right person. Lawyers negotiate from a single workspace that tracks every version and turn, and after signing, contracts are stored in a searchable repository. Later this year, Spellbook plans to add monitoring that flags renewals and new risks across a team's full portfolio. Spellbook ACM is currently available to select teams, with a broader rollout planned this summer.

While early innovators in legal tech focused on the business of law, like case management and time tracking, Spellbook focused on the actual execution of legal work. Its place within the legal tech ecosystem, particularly its AI-powered drafting tool for Microsoft Word, has led to widespread adoption. Four funding rounds totaling more than $120 million, including a recent $40 million debt financing fund from RBCx for strategic acquisitions, illustrate that investors value Spellbook’s AI-driven approach to legal tech.

Spellbook’s entry into the market coincided with rapid advances in large language models, especially with the emergence of GPT-3 models from OpenAI. The company’s early engagement with generative AI helped create a product that customers want to use, particularly for in-house legal teams seeking greater efficiency in managing contract workflows.

Unlike many legal tech startups, Spellbook’s quickly found a path to profitability. The company generated nearly $500,000 in revenue by mid-2022 and now projects $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2026 after tripling revenues over the past year.

Daniel Di Maria, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Spellbook, attributes the company’s growth to finding strong adoption among in-house legal teams that have traditionally struggled with managing contract lifecycles: “We’re really obsessed with the contract problem, the execution of legal work problem. Spellbook is focused on the messy middle — the drafting, reviewing, redlining, and negotiating that makes up the contract lifecycle.” Di Maria goes on to note how in-house legal teams’ eagerness to test the limits of AI has helped improve its product and enabled companies realize unexpected efficiencies.

For example, legal teams can use the Playbook-Driven Contract Review feature, a benchmarking tool that reviews contracts against the company’s preferred standards and even offers comparisons to market standards. This not only streamlines contract review. When previously stored, but forgotten, contract data is imported into a draft agreement, proprietary information becomes a valuable negotiation resource. This opt-in feature ensures strict privacy and data protection standards are followed when extracting and anonymizing contract data within the benchmarking process.

Di Maria notes that AI can offer in-house legal teams the capacity to do work that has traditionally been outsourced at very high hourly rates to law firms. He says: “There is a better economic case for in-house legal teams to adopt AI in a deeper, more practical way. The incentive to get the most out of AI is aligned with what they’re looking for: be efficient and do as much as you can with less.”

Spellbook’s Autonomous Contract Management is an AI system that tracks the entire lifecycle of a contract and moves far beyond the redlining and review features that made it an essential resource for 4,500 legal teams across 85 countries. Spellbook’s plan to continue its rapid growth through strategic acquisitions and continued development of generative AI tools helps transactional legal teams build greater efficiency into their organizations.