Wordsmith uses Claude to transform legal operations from 4-day bottlenecks to 4-minute workflows
Industry:
Legal
Company size:
Small
Product:
Claude Code
Location:
Europe
4 minutes instead of 4 days
Complex 400-page contract reviews with 300-point compliance checks completed in minutes rather than days
20-30% faster feature development
Engineering velocity improvement using Claude Code across the development team
The problem
The solution
"Not all AI is created equally when you're a lawyer and you care about the output."
CEO of Wordsmith
Wordsmith builds AI-powered legal technology specifically for in-house legal teams, helping them service their organizations more effectively through contract review, agreement drafting, and seamless system integration. Founded by CEO Ross McNairn, a former lawyer turned CTO, the company serves thousands of legal teams from Fortune 500 companies to leading technology firms.
Wordsmith chose Claude after comprehensive evaluation across 40 different use case categories. The platform scored approximately 30% better than alternatives in their legal evaluation suite—a massive change when they typically saw single-digit improvements. Beyond technical performance, Claude's trustworthy brand proved critical for risk-conscious legal departments, making it "a much easier sell" according to McNairn.
With Claude, IFS Nexus Black:
- Transforms days into minutes: Processes 400-page contract bundles with 300-point compliance checks in 4-5 minutes
- Produces professional legal documents: Creates properly structured agreements that understand the blueprint of good legal writing
- Maintains jurisdiction compliance: Ensures data remains ephemeral and jurisdiction-locked for EU and US requirements
- Accelerates development: Powers engineering workflows with 20-30% velocity improvements through Claude Code
- Enables instant legal guidance: Provides immediate, accurate responses when legal teams aren't available
The impossible balancing act
In-house legal teams faced a fundamental problem: business teams needed instant legal guidance, contract reviews, and document drafting, but legal departments remained understaffed and overwhelmed. A single contract review bundle could contain 400 pages across multiple agreements, taking paralegals three to four days to analyze against compliance playbooks. Meanwhile, business decisions waited.
The technical challenge proved equally daunting. Legal documents require precise formatting, specific language, and contextual understanding that general AI models couldn't deliver. "Not all AI is created equally when you're a lawyer and you care about the output," explained Ross McNairn, CEO of Wordsmith. Existing solutions produced "homogenized" documents that looked AI-generated rather than professionally crafted.
Data privacy concerns, especially in the European Union, created additional barriers. Legal teams needed absolute clarity on data handling, jurisdiction controls, and the ability to provide detailed security documentation to their own clients. Without these guarantees, adoption remained impossible regardless of technical capabilities.
Claude powers the transformation from reactive to proactive legal
Wordsmith implemented Claude as the core of their drafting engine after their model-agnostic evaluation framework "lit up green" across the board. The integration with AWS Bedrock provided the infrastructure control they needed—ephemeral data handling, jurisdiction locking, and scalability across regions.
The implementation transformed Wordsmith's most complex workflows. The platform now processes email bundles with hundreds of pages of contracting data, deconstructing agreements, analyzing them against 300-point playbooks, scraping linked documents, and producing fully marked-up Word documents with high-90% accuracy. "This does what would have taken 3 or 4 days from a paralegal," McNairn explained.
"If it's spitting out a really average homogenized NDA, it's not that helpful," said McNairn. "But if you're getting something that structurally understands the blueprint of what a good legal document looks like, that brings you into a whole different league of usefulness."
The engineering team also adopted Claude Code extensively, dropping many licenses in favor of Claude's development environment. This shift delivered 20-30% improvement in developer velocity, accelerating feature development across the platform.
Beyond the technology, Claude's positioning mattered for Wordsmith's clients. "Claude's got great positioning in terms of this ICP and how trusted it is by lawyers because of how seriously they take the ethical components," McNairn noted. The lack of controversy and strong ethical stance made Claude easier to sell to risk-averse legal departments.
The outcome
Today, Wordsmith powers thousands of legal teams with Claude at its core, fundamentally changing how in-house counsel operates. The drafting capability, previously "fairly useless," became the platform's most-used feature after implementing Claude. Usage frequency per user doubled within months of the upgrade.
The transformation extends beyond efficiency metrics. Legal teams no longer function as bottlenecks but as accelerators. Product teams get instant legal guidance. Sales teams receive contract reviews in minutes. Engineering teams access compliance checks without waiting. The entire organization moves faster.
"We think that in-house legal is effectively going to become the tendrils that spread through the entire company and accelerate every single team," predicted McNairn. "Imagine if you had a lawyer on demand, instantly available whenever you needed them, that was personalized perfectly and controlled for your company. The role of legal could be 100x more impactful than they currently are."
The platform now serves organizations ranging from major UK PLCs to NASDAQ-listed companies, passing stringent security reviews including Anthropic's own legal team evaluation. The combination of technical capability and enterprise-grade security enables legal teams to deploy AI assistance across their entire workflow while maintaining compliance standards.
Looking ahead, Wordsmith plans to use Claude for precision across large bodies of data, using robust context windows without degradation for complex legal analysis.
"We'd love to provide them the rails to deploy that over the next couple of years," said McNairn about empowering legal teams. "To do that in a way that doesn't slow people down and actually accelerates them would make them far more effective."
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"Not all AI is created equally when you're a lawyer and you care about the output."
CEO of Wordsmith
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