DraftWise, the pioneering AI contract drafting and negotiation platform, has rolled out a major upgrade to its Markup review capability, which it believes will set a ‘category standard’ for AI-driven contract analysis. (See in-depth AL interview below with CEO, James Ding).
Its newly enhanced contract review system now has more use cases, enhanced AI outputs, and several new capabilities, including customizable checklists.
Core to this expansion has been an extensive partnership with several AmLaw 100 firms to gather feedback. This followed Markup’s initial release in June 2024. Meanwhile, they have gained ISO 27001 certification and taken the strategic step of expanding into Mid-Law and inhouse. The moves also follow a genAI partnership with Cohere, announced previously in AL.
The company explained that Markup operates as a legal AI assistant that ‘integrates directly with Microsoft Word, providing real-time contract analysis based on a firm’s guidelines, playbooks, and precedents’.
Markup identifies potential issues, suggests appropriate language, and delivers context-aware guidance that reflects specific negotiation strategies and client preferences, they added.
And here’s what some well-known customers said. Joe Green, Chief Innovation Officer at Gunderson Dettmer, noted: ‘The continuous evolution of the platform and the DraftWise team’s rapid integration of feedback from our lawyers into their offerings reflect our shared commitment to advancing legal practice through thoughtful AI adoption.’
While Vedika Mehera Ahlgren, Director of Orrick Labs, added: ‘As we work with our venture capital and M&A teams to integrate AI into their playbooks and make all kinds of tasks more efficient, DraftWise’s Markup tool is proving to be a key part of the solution.’
While James Ding, CEO of DraftWise, commented, see more below: ‘In a landscape flooded with generic AI tools making broad promises, DraftWise takes a fundamentally different approach. We’re not just participating in the AI revolution, but establishing a category standard for truly effective enterprise Legal AI.’
And now read the in-depth AL Interview with James Ding.
How much of a step forward is this update to Markup? (What specifically makes this more advanced than before?)
We spent the last year focused on enhancing accuracy and adoption in real-world environments – with some of the highest revenue-generating law firms in the world – to improve the Markup platform, not just incrementally but monumentally.
We know that Gen AI ‘out of the box’ isn’t good at understanding a firm’s nuanced contracts and providing input like ‘redlining; and revision suggestions. When you look at recent evaluations, the lowest performing benchmarks are in the ‘redlining’ category.
With Markup, we have a tested AI platform that can redline and suggest revisions (based on the firm’s unique precedent, deal data, and historical knowledge) with the accuracy required of Big Law firms.
The result enables attorneys to begin using Markup immediately with minimal workflow disruption. Markup as it exists today provides a clear pathway for users to gradually expand usage as comfort and trust in the system grows. Through extensive testing with our customers, we’ve identified and overcome barriers to adoption by developing new features and knowledge structures that create a frictionless onboarding experience.
We accomplished this because of the enormous talent on our ML and engineering teams, yes, but also because of how closely we build with and for our customers. We constantly field feedback and iterate, incorporating the best available technology for the pain points we are trying to solve. There’s no magic bullet; it’s months of hard work and customer listening.
What genAI tech / LLMs are leveraged for these new ’skills’? (e.g. much of this is from Cohere, but what are they using to deliver these results?)
At DraftWise, we believe in choosing LLM providers to maximize performance on the real problems we’re solving with our customers. We leverage state-of-the-art Gen AI architecture, not only the models themselves (of which we use both ‘reasoning’ and ‘chat’ models, including OpenAI and Cohere) but also AI agents and distributed computing to parallelize the work. Reasoning models have unlocked a much higher accuracy bar for components of review and drafting that LLMs previously struggled with.
Scaling our internal alignment datasets, created painstakingly by our internal legal team, is critical for delivering results that meet our customers’ extremely high domain-specific expectations. Even then, we understood LLMs are never perfect, and in Markup, the end-user is very much in control of access and output.
How is this different to competitors?
While playbook-based approaches are powerful, they often face significant delays due to the challenge of reaching a consensus on negotiation strategies. Many firms are only now discovering this hurdle. Our approach is fundamentally different: We’ve developed features and knowledge structures that lawyers can use independently from day one while still maintaining their ability to build shared playbooks.
We’re taking a different approach to overcome the major problems with playbooks: 1) Not good enough to use outside of NDAs and commercial agreements, 2) Time-consuming and tedious to create and cater to each client.
Through our Smart Draft product, we have the deepest connection to and utilization of precedent in the market. With Markup, we have an incredible unified platform supporting a lawyer through drafting and reviewing.
Lawyers use our platform for “meaty” contract types beyond NDAs and comm agreements, and now, you can get highly customized results (both the language used and the rules defined) with less effort than other solutions by incorporating precedent.
This creates a unified system that delivers immediate value to each attorney while supporting a gradual evolution toward collaborative processes and access to firm-wide institutional knowledge.
The move into Mid-Law is very interesting, is this because they use more fixed fees? (i.e. no worries about efficiency vs time issues?) Is there a similar benefit for inhouse?
The move into Mid-law stems from these firms’ emphasis on client service excellence and their flexibility with innovative billing models, including fixed fees. Markup directly supports this business approach by automating client-specific best practices while improving responsiveness. This combination helps Mid-law firms enhance their service reputation while increasing profitability under newer fee structures, creating a perfect opportunity to capitalize on the enormous potential AI presents for this segment. Mid-law firms that embrace new technologies now stand to gain significant competitive advantages in efficiency, service quality, and market differentiation.
In-house legal teams value efficiency, but their primary focus is protecting the business through expert knowledge of their specific company. Markup enables in-house teams to identify risks quickly according to their internal standards and preferences. This targeted approach saves valuable time and allows in-house counsel to dedicate more resources to meaningful risk mitigation rather than routine document review. The result is more comprehensive legal responses without becoming a bottleneck in business operations.
And finally, how many staff do you have now, and what’s the funding position like?
Since raising our $20m Series A last March, we’ve more than doubled our team and expanded offices in two key markets – NYC and London. We continue to see significant growth and are powering even more of the world’s highest-performing legal teams than ever before.
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You can find out more about DraftWise and its upgraded Markup capability here.
