The Origin of Spellbook

Four years ago, our team came together as Rally, on a mission to make the lives of lawyers better while making their services more accessible to clients. Compared to every other profession, lawyers have to put up with an enormous amount of drudgery. And their clients have to pay for it. After working with hundreds of lawyers, we learned that they desperately wanted to adopt technology and to streamline their workflows, but that legaltech, for the most part, failed to service their needs.

Lawyers often perform highly personalized and bespoke work. So, while template-based automation is helpful, it’s not always sufficient to meet the day-to-day needs for lawyers’ nuanced reviews and edits. Additionally, lawyers are tired of jumping between different applications.

In the software development world, GitHub Copilot emerged as an AI tool for programmers, powered by GPT-3. It used a new AI technology called large language models (LLMs) to suggest what programmers should write next, as they worked. GitHub Copilot integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio Code, a predominant programming app (no need to switch to another app!). It effortlessly gave software developers a “wind at their back” that helped them do what they were already doing, but better.

We recognized the direct applicability of GitHub’s solution to the legal sector and its ability to effectively resolve the persistent challenges that lawyers encounter in their daily work. Pioneering the market, we leveraged generative AI as the groundbreaking "AI Copilot for lawyers," launching Spellbook in less than a year, in September 2022. We wanted to mimic the usefulness of Github Copilot by creating a tool that met lawyers where they were, without jumping between applications, while helping them automate bespoke text review and editing.

It was a hit.

Customers came pouring in faster than we could keep up with. We went from serving one legal team per week to 50 legal teams per week. Now, Spellbook is used by over 600 legal teams, with over 54,000 waitlist signups.

And not only are lawyers signing up, they are getting tremendous use out of Spellbook, sticking around and giving us incredible feedback.

Now, we’re ready to take Spellbook to the next level.
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Our Fundraise & What It Means

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve secured $10.9M in financing from Moxxie Ventures, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Inovia Capital, The LegalTech Fund, Bling Capital & others.

This funding will propel Spellbook forward rapidly. We will be doubling the size of our team this year. We’ll be hiring engineers, AI experts, lawyers and product specialists to help onboard our waitlist. (If you’re interested in joining our team, please check out our careers page!)

Most importantly, this will mean speeding innovation and the development of extensive new functionality for our customers.
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Working with Thomson Reuters

Moving forward, we are excited to have the #1 legal technology provider in the world onboard, Thomson Reuters. Their products are used by 97 percent of Law100 firms. Their libraries, Westlaw and PracticalLaw, are the gold standard. We can’t say much more about our plans now, but one reason we chose to work with TR on this financing is the potential synergy between our products.
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Our Vision, and the Evolution of Rally

Due to the explosive growth of Spellbook, we are changing our name from Rally to Spellbook. But this is not the end of the Rally legal automation platform. It’s the beginning.

In the coming months we will be merging the Rally platform with Spellbook to create unprecedented new AI features for our customers, including the ability to:

• Ask questions about entire legal datarooms
• Automatically store and sort legal documents
• Cross-reference disparate legal data sources
• Automatically find relevant templates as you draft in Word
• Automatically extract key data points from large document repositories
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Assistive AI is the Future

Overall, our approach will be continuing to develop what we call Assistive AI. We are not replacing lawyers, nor do we allow users to “delegate” full legal tasks to Spellbook. If a lawyer's current work is like riding a bicycle, we are an electric bicycle helping them do what they are already doing, only faster, smoother, and easier. And that will remain core to our approach.

Spellbook has a familiar chat window like ChatGPT, but what makes it really special are the numerous ways it can provide value to a lawyer before they even know they need it.

Open a contract in Word? Spellbook will automatically provide you with suggestions on how to improve it.

Start drafting a new clause? Spellbook will find the most relevant examples for you automatically.

Need to reference another document? Spellbook will dig up the other document for you.

Lawyers have one of the hardest, most underappreciated jobs in the world. They’re not even close to being replaced by AI. But AI can certainly help them work faster and more accurately than before.

You can read the full press release here.