Why Contract Intelligence Built for Big Law is Winning In-House

When we founded Draftwise in 2020, we had a clear thesis: AI would enable the best lawyers to leverage institutional memory better than anyone else. Five years later, that thesis has only crystallized.

The competitive landscape has fundamentally shifted. What once differentiated (think: technical execution, baseline expertise, process efficiency) is now table stakes. The new moat is your unique data and your ability to extract insights from it faster than competitors.

Everyone has access to generic intelligence. Only you have access to your intelligence: your firm's hundreds of closed deals, your team's hard-won lessons from failed investments, your organization's evolved negotiating positions across thousands of contracts.

But that proprietary experience is only valuable if you can access and utilize it faster than your competitors. The in-house team that can instantly apply consistent playbooks and surface relevant precedent wins against the team still manually searching emails or hoping institutional knowledge lives in someone's head.

The New Economics of Competitive Advantage

AI is no longer a differentiator – you have to think of it as table stakes. Every firm now has access to GPT-4, Claude, or the latest model, which promises to revolutionize legal work. The playing field leveled overnight.

But talk to any general partner at a top PE firm or any GC managing a portfolio of fast-moving deals, and they'll tell you the same thing: speed still wins. Consistency still matters. The ability to instantly surface "here are 10 similar situations and what worked" still crushes the competition.

The firms and companies winning today aren't winning because they have better AI. They're winning because they've figured out how to turn decades of proprietary experience into deployable competitive intelligence.

What We Learned in 2025

Last year was a big year for Draftwise. We launched our agentic AI and witnessed incredible growth among our Big Law customers.

Usage and stickiness aren't just interesting metrics for VCs to track. There's a reason firms are making unprecedented resource allocations across practice technology and knowledge management: adoption of tools that work drives incredible value for the firm's bottom line.

Every CIO is asking the same question of their AI investments: What is this doing for our firm?

We reclaimed an estimated 3,100 non-billable hours for each of our law firm customers. With Draftwise, every practice group is effectively gaining an additional associate.

We can turn to our customers and say, with confidence, that Draftwise is delivering value that can be easily communicated. And not just to firm leadership. Our customers can report back to their clients how AI investments are decreasing "ghost hours," increasing velocity, and ensuring accuracy across every deal.

The AI conversations happening between firms and clients gave us an early signal of where to build next.

The In-House Opportunity

In-house teams were already hearing about Draftwise from their outside counsel – and often forcing the conversation for how they could do more with less, but without the upside of billable hours. Why not bring them the same value directly?

Our Big Law customers were already making the case for us because their clients were seeing the proof points in real time. The decision to expand to in-house was a natural widening of the umbrella. We had built confidence with Big Law, validated the market fit, and were now ready to serve both sides of the table.

Over the last year and a half, we met with hundreds of in-house lawyers, legal operations professionals, and general counsels. The biggest takeaway is how well Draftwise's core capabilities align with in-house workflows.

Proof Point: NDA Review

Consider NDA review. It’s unglamorous, high-volume, mission-critical work that exists at the intersection of legal precision and business velocity.

For a PE firm managing hundreds of NDAs annually across deal origination, portfolio transactions, and vendor relationships, traditional review is a nightmare. Each NDA consumes hours of lawyer time. The Playbook application is inconsistent. Knowledge stays siloed with whoever handled the last round of deals. Bottlenecks compound.

In competitive deal environments, these inefficiencies can cost an entire deal. 

What we've seen with our earliest in-house design partners, particularly in VC, PE, and high-growth SaaS, is that reducing NDA review time from two hours to two minutes enables an entirely different operating model. One where legal can move at the speed of business instead of being the reason deals slow down.

As one GC at a top-tier venture capital firm told us: "The time saved is viscerally experienced."

Two Markets, One Problem

We've seen broad traction, but two segments are particularly interesting and, on the surface, seem quite different: SaaS enterprises and deal-intensive financial firms.

Financial services firms (PE, VC, hedge funds) operate in hyper-competitive environments where being first to term sheet or first to close can mean the difference between winning and losing a deal. They need legal teams that can process high volumes of standardized contracts without sacrificing accuracy or strategic insight.

SaaS companies face a different flavor of the same challenge: explosive contract volume that scales faster than headcount. Every new customer, every new vendor relationship, every partnership requires legal review. They must maintain quality and consistency while moving at software speed.

Both segments share a common reality: their legal teams not only support the business but can enable competitive strategy if given the opportunity and leverage. 

The Case For Contract Intelligence

Legal AI is not enough. Everyone will have access to good, generalized AI. What separates winners from everyone else is the ability to transform institutional knowledge into accessible, actionable, compounding competitive intelligence.

That's what makes Draftwise so valuable. Think of us like infrastructure for institutional memory. We help organizations capture what their best lawyers know, codify it, and deploy it consistently across every deal, every negotiation, every review.

A corporate counsel at a publicly traded media company recently shared, "The reason we chose your tool is that the redlining is better than the others. It actually redlines." 

It’s reflective of a product built by people who understand how lawyers actually work, what they actually need, and how good legal judgment compounds over time.

Looking Ahead

Expanding from Big Law to in-house was a natural widening of the umbrella we'd already built.

The infrastructure we built to transform institutional knowledge at AmLaw 100 firms works just as well for in-house teams who need that same capability without the overhead of a full practice technology stack.

What's become clear is that Fortune 500s, Big Four accounting firms, high-growth startups, PE shops, and VC funds all face versions of the same fundamental challenge: how do you ensure your best legal thinking doesn't walk out the door when people leave? How do you make decades of hard-won experience instantly accessible to whoever needs it?

In 2026, we're being deliberate about creating value for both sides of the table. Big Law remains core to who we are, and we're excited to bring that same rigor to in-house legal teams who face the same pressure, the same volume, and the same imperative to turn institutional knowledge into competitive advantage.

The question every legal and business leader should be asking is how they plan to cultivate a winning intelligence strategy. Because your competitive advantage isn't artificial intelligence. It's your intelligence.