Spellbook

Spellbook builds generative AI tools for the legal profession. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Canada, the company launched its flagship product, Spellbook, in September 2022 as the first generative AI copilot for lawyers. The software augments legal judgment and removes document drudgery - redlining contracts among its core use cases - so that lawyers can concentrate on strategic work. It is used by more than 4,000 customers across 80 countries.

The engineering problems are substantive. Spellbook works with large language models, including OpenAI's GPT-4, and tunes them on proprietary legal datasets to produce output reliable enough for professional use in law firms and legal services. The team is composed of engineers, AI experts and legal professionals working in concert, and the company spent years in the trenches with law firms before shipping a product. It has raised $80M in total funding, with backing from Khosla Ventures, Thomson Reuters Ventures and Inovia Capital.

Spellbook operates as a distributed team across Canada, collaborating asynchronously with regular in-person gatherings. The company optimises for focus and impact over facetime, ships rapidly and learns from customers, and holds to a distinct view of the technology: AI that augments rather than replaces legal judgment. The stated mission is to make legal services more accessible - beginning with lawyers who are home for dinner rather than redlining contracts until midnight.