Wordsmith AI Ltd., an Edinburgh, Scotland-based artificial intelligence platform for in-house teams announced Tuesday it has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures to forward what its chief executive calls a mission to turn lawyers into legal engineers.

Wordsmith helps in-house business legal teams automate contract and policy reviews with the productivity tools they have, deliver structured legal support for every department and extract legal insights from past work. It does this by applying agentic AI and a chatbot that can answer questions or work within Microsoft Word via a plugin.

Company Chief Executive Ross McNairn became a lawyer over ten years ago and discovered that it was a tedious, slow and repetitive job. He switched professions to a software engineer and then decided to apply that knowledge to the legal trade, from this the idea of Wordsmith was born.

“Lawyers are going to have the capability of having an outsized capability to have outsized impact as they move into what we believe is going to be a legal engineering role,” McNairn said.

Legal professionals can quickly and easily take a contract or policy document and pass it over to Wordsmith’s AI agent which will process it for review. This can include any type of document from Word, PDF or even a link. The AI will adapt to the businesses’ custom playbook, risks and negotiation style, to highlight deviations – major, minor or cleared – and note them for review so that legal can update them in the document.

The document review process can handle a multitude of agreement types out-of-the-box, including non-disclosure agreements, data processing agreements, software-as-a-service agreements, terms of service and recruitment services agreements, with many more agreement types coming soon. If the company wants the system to understand the business’s own specialized playbook, Wordsmith’s AI can be told to ingest contracts and mirror the format it sees in documents.

In addition to that, Wordsmith provides a legal AI assistant that can transcribe audio or images into text documents, provide in-line citations for where it receives its answers, translate entire documents across 22 different languages, and draft communications.

The company’s AI agents can connect to legal professionals where they work, including in Slack, email, Word and Google Docs.

McNarin said he saw Wordsmith as a powerful tool for legal professionals that enables them to augment their workflow to create tighter cycles so that businesses can move faster.

The company already claims several large customers, including the legal teams from Deliveroo plc., Trustpilot Group plc. and Virgin Group Ltd.

With the new funding, McNairn, the company intends to expand in Edinburgh, London and New York and across Europe, deepen its infrastructure and agent capabilities, and launch a Wordsmith Legal Enablement Academy.

“We’re not just building features. We’re redefining the role of legal,” said McNairn. “Every lawyer should have tools that scale their judgment.”

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