Scaling faster than legal capacity
The challenge was clear: budget growth wasn’t keeping pace with the company’s rapid expansion. As Trustpilot moved from serving SMEs to operating at enterprise scale, the legal work became significantly more complex.

As Anoop Joshi explains, moving upmarket introduced entirely new demands for a legal team that was already stretched. Lawyers were each handling around 200 contract negotiations a month, while managing a constant influx of requests from across the business. Something had to change.

Build or buy?
Trustpilot were early adopters of AI. They'd already started building their own generative AI tools for content moderation, fake review analysis, and contract review.

But they hit a wall quickly. Building in-house was far more resource-intensive than anticipated. Engineers and data scientists were being pulled away from their core responsibilities. The opportunity cost didn't make sense.

The team realised what they needed was a product built by people who wake up every day thinking about legal workflows, not an internal side project competing for engineering time.

That's when Anoop met Ross McNairn, CEO at Wordsmith. What stood out? "Their willingness to dig deep and solve our problems," says Anoop.

How Trustpilot uses AI today

Trustpilot uses AI across three main areas: commercial contracts, privacy requests, and content moderation.

Commercial contracts

Each lawyer supports around 200 commercial contract negotiations a month. Predominantly enterprise deals with vendors and procurement teams. Using Wordsmith's First Pass tool, they review contracts like NDAs and vendor agreements against internal playbooks. The system identifies provisions that don't comply with their policies and automatically drafts redlines.

The result: an average of 160 minutes saved per SaaS contract review, an 85% reduction in handling time.

Privacy and compliance

Trustpilot handles around 5,000 requests from consumers, businesses, and regulators every month. Privacy is non-negotiable. AI helps them maintain consistency and speed without compromising on accuracy.

Through Wordsmith's legal letter analysis, the team now handles 300-500 legal letters per week, and crucially, stays ahead of deadlines. In some jurisdictions, missing a legal letter deadline can be a costly mistake.

Content-moderation

Before AI, the team manually handled around 60,000 content moderation requests per month. Mishandling any of these could lead to litigation. Wordsmith now helps them manage this volume while maintaining quality.

Sales and supplier workflows

Wordsmith has helped Trustpilot's team quickly draft responses to over 500 sales negotiation requests in the past year using their custom playbooks.

Their supplier due diligence workload has more than doubled, driven by a significant increase in high-value engagements, annual contract value from these suppliers has tripled. To scale effectively, Trustpilot trained Wordsmith's Supplier Intake Workflow using around 50 past responses. The system now supports their commercial legal, security, and privacy teams, processing over 5,000 security-related questions and 2,000 privacy queries. The result: consistent, high-quality reviews at speed, without compromising on risk visibility or governance.

Three takeaways from Trustpilot's journey

1. Own it. Don't wait for someone else to figure it out. Trustpilot experimented early and learned what worked for them.

2. Efficiency, not unemployment. AI didn't replace their legal team, it made the team capable of handling a significantly larger workload.

3. Buy, don't build. For most teams, a ready-made tool purpose-built for legal workflows will outperform an internal build. Let specialists focus on what they do best.

What's next

Looking ahead, Trustpilot sees AI moving from a point solution to a permanent layer in how legal operates. They’re already exploring a dispute assistant that can draft tailored response letters for individual cases, turning a traditionally slow, manual process into something fast, consistent, and scalable. It’s a glimpse of what legal teams can unlock when AI is embedded directly into day-to-day work with Wordsmith.