Legaltech startup Genie AI scores £2M seed for its ‘intelligent’ contract editor

Genie AI, a legal tech startup and Entrepreneur First alumni, has raised £2 million in funding. The round is a combination of equity and a U.K. government grant, and will be used to continue development of the company’s “intelligent” contract editor for law firms and an upcoming product targeting GDPR compliance.

Leading the £1.2 million equity investment is Connect Ventures, with participation from a number of angel investors, including former President of the Supreme Court Lord Neuberger and Professor Jun Wang at UCL. The £800,000 grant was awarded by UK Research and Innovation.

“Lawyers always tell us ‘I know I’ve done something like that before,’ but in large firms it’s a real pain to dig past drafting out of emails, document management systems and the minds of senior lawyers,” says Genie AI co-founder and CEO Rafie Faruq. “SuperDrafter solves this by automatically curating relevant knowledge from around the firm, and recommending clauses to lawyers as they draft, in real time”.

The broader idea is that SuperDrafter can enable lawyers to benefit from the “collective intelligence” — both past and present — of an entire law firm. It does this by machine reading thousands of documents confidentially and then analyses variations of the same clause to deuce market standards and allow lawyers to negotiate the best deal for their clients.

In addition, Genie AI claims that SuperDrafter does not require a human to tag or train the required data. Instead, the algorithm “learns by itself”.

“When drafting documents, lawyers typically start from a template, a document from a negotiating party, or an “automated” first draft using a questionnaire. Next, in order to tailor or negotiate the contract as it goes back and forth, lawyers typically have to search for past wording or tweak certain clauses and there are always thousands of variations of the same clause,” explains Faruq.

“[Using SuperDrafter], lawyers can now do this in one click, by simply loading in a document and viewing recommended clauses for each part of the contract. This gives lawyers the collective intelligence of the firm at their fingertips”.

The upshot, says Faruq, is that Genie AI’s solution makes contract drafting not just significantly faster but also much more robust. “More interestingly, our clients are increasingly using SuperDrafter not just for efficiency, but to win the best deal in every matter,” he adds. “Contracts specify commercial relationships, and we can get you the best terms, predicted from hundreds of thousands of past examples”.

The intelligent contract editor is being piloted with law firms Clifford Chance, Pinsent Masons and Withers, where it is being used to draw up lengthy contracts within banking and finance. “We believe the complexity lends itself to AI-assisted drafting, where machines can augment lawyers with the collective intelligence of millions of past examples,” says Faruq.

Meanwhile, Genie AI is already working on a second product. Dubbed “Anonymiser”, the software can be used SuperDrafter or standalone and with will automatically redact confidential information from contracts so than companies can comply with GDPR regulation and preserve client confidentiality.