Built on Microsoft Azure cloud, Wordsmith is an enterprise legal AI platform built for in-house teams and the businesses they serve.
Wordsmith co-founder Ross McNairn began his career as a lawyer but left the profession and went into software engineering after becoming disillusioned with the legal world’s time-obsessed billing culture.
“My life was ruled by clocks,” he says. “Every task was measured in six-minute blocks and every thought tied to a billable hour. It wasn’t deeply fulfilling.”
But after a decade in tech, he felt drawn back to the legal profession because there was a problem he thought he could solve.
“I wanted to come back and build something for lawyers that would make them more efficient, not better at watching clocks,” he recalls.
So he created Wordsmith and launched the company in Edinburgh in January 2024. And as “Scotland’s fastest-growing start-up” enjoying tenfold revenue growth last year, it now has offices in New York and London and a wide variety of clients, including BT, Canva, and The Financial Times.
“Wordsmith is a legal AI platform built for in-house teams,” McNairn explains. “We help them organise their work and accelerate the workflows they power for the rest of the company.”
In-house lawyers don’t just advise on individual issues, they support the whole business, fielding requests across contracts, risk, hiring and procurement. Many of those tasks are repeated frequently, time-sensitive, and involve the use of documents, emails and internal systems.
So “in-house legal teams have a clear motivation to become more efficient,” says McNairn. “They can’t simply bill more time for harder jobs: they need to fit them into their existing capacity.”
Engineering trust
Wordsmith helps lawyers review and mark-up contracts, find trusted legal information from reputable authorities, extract tasks from emails, and organise workflows.
But it’s also built to extend that capability to the rest of the business, letting other teams handle routine legal tasks themselves, safely, without every request needing to go through the legal department.
McNairn says general-purpose AI tools aren’t right for this kind of work, because of concerns around accuracy, information provenance, and privacy. Unlike other functions, the consequences of getting it wrong are significant.
“Lawyers feel all of those anxieties and more,” he says.
So Wordsmith uses only verified legal sources to give teams confidence and makes use of Microsoft Azure’s strong security, governance and location controls.
“We can control where your data goes,” he says. “We can trust Microsoft as a partner to make sure all data is safe and audited and that we can control the region in which it’s stored and processed.”
Added IQ
Wordsmith has also been built to integrate with well-known Microsoft programs that many legal teams use, such as Word, Outlook, Teams and SharePoint, McNairn says, to make adoption as easy and non-disruptive as possible.
Microsoft’s Work IQ is also a major enabler, he says. In simple terms, this is an intelligence layer in Microsoft 365 that understands how work actually gets done – connecting information from emails, meetings, documents and chats to provide relevant context. Wordsmith builds on this shared intelligence layer.
“Microsoft has been building a layer of really accessible AI tools that sit on top of their productivity tools,” McNairn says. “That layer makes it easy for our AI to coordinate and work with all of the Microsoft products.”
For Wordsmith, that means faster development, effortless integrations, and more contextual relevance. It’s like having a “genius new lawyer” arriving on day one who quickly behaves like a lawyer who’s been in the business for 10 years, he says, able to draw on prior contracts, decisions and internal history.
From blocker to accelerator
The technology is having a big impact, says McNairn, with one customer reducing spending on external counsel by more than £7.5 million ($10m) in a year. In other cases, McNairn says it cuts drafting, review and advisory time on repeated workflows by more than 80%, while also sharply reducing turnaround times for legal requests.
That matters because legal often sits at a critical juncture within a business – when contracts take weeks, revenue slows; when approvals drag, hiring and procurement do as well.
Wordsmith’s aim is not to replace lawyers, but to help them handle more work faster and with greater confidence, he says.
“If you deploy Wordsmith, legal will go from being a blocker to being an accelerator of other teams.”
Jason Graefe, Corporate Vice President, AI Partner Catalyst Team, Microsoft, concludes: “As AI becomes integral to how legal teams work, trust and governance are just as important as innovation.
“By building on Microsoft Azure, Wordsmith is able to deliver powerful AI capabilities within a secure, compliant, and well governed platform, giving organisations the confidence to adopt AI at scale while meeting their most rigorous regulatory and data protection requirements.”