DraftWise

DraftWise is an AI contract drafting and review platform built for transactional lawyers, delivered as a plug in that lives inside Microsoft Word where drafting actually happens. Founded by chief executive James Ding, a former Palantir engineer, the company set out to free lawyers from what many of them call cut and paste drone work. Its customers include leading firms such as Orrick, Gunderson Dettmer, and Mishcon de Reya, and it consistently ranks among the top legal drafting tools in industry surveys of large global firms.

The core idea is precedent driven drafting. Rather than pulling from generic internet data, DraftWise learns from a firm's own historical contracts, clauses, and negotiated positions, then suggests language consistent with how that firm has drafted before. It connects to the document systems where that precedent lives, including iManage, NetDocuments, OpenText, SharePoint, and Google Drive, and layers on tools like Deal Table for comparing key terms across thousands of agreements and automatically curated playbooks.

In 2025 DraftWise introduced the AI Associate, a drafting agent that takes a plain request and drafts, reviews, and marks up contracts using firm endorsed language. It can run many searches at once across millions of documents, apply revisions directly into the contract, and surface positions the firm accepted in past deals, while the lawyer keeps control of every change and can check every citation. Lawyers at top firms accept a large majority of its suggestions.

Under the hood DraftWise runs a retrieval augmented generation system on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, using Cohere models for generation, search, and reranking alongside reasoning models, with fine tuning on its own legal data. Security is treated as a first principle: the platform is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, General Data Protection Regulation compliant, and mirrors a firm's document management permissions so access control matches existing rules. Cloud and on premises deployment options are available, and DraftWise retains precise control over which information is collected, stored, and used for model training.