Legal Week, New York. We are here

This week Wordsmith is in New York for Legal Week, and the energy in this market is unlike anything I have seen. We are meeting with legal leaders from some of the largest enterprises in the world, taking over Madman Coffee for a few days, and making it clear that we are here to stay. One theme keeps coming up in conversation: in-house legal teams everywhere are under enormous pressure to handle more work without growing headcount.

We officially expanded into the United States this week. The US is expected to account for more than 50% of Wordsmith's revenue by the end of 2026. That is not surprising when you consider that the United States is the largest legal market in the world, and the place where companies spend the most on outside counsel when their internal teams hit capacity. The sheer scale of that spend makes it clear that the market is ready for a change.

Here are three things we are genuinely excited about.

1. The rise of the legal engineer, and why the most underrated hire in legal right now is a 25-year-old who can build

There is a loud conversation happening right now about AI replacing lawyers. We think that framing is almost entirely wrong, and it is missing the most interesting thing happening in the profession.

Big Law was built on a specific model: extract value from junior lawyers billing hours, charge clients a premium for the name above the door, and reward the partners who control the client relationships. That model made sense in a world where legal work could only scale by adding more people and more billable hours, and now that model is dying. Not because AI is automating everything, but because the individual lawyer is becoming more powerful than the firm. Client relationships are personal. Expertise is portable. And the tools to practice at the highest level no longer require a thousand-person institution behind you.

The future is fractional. It is in-house. It is the brilliant individual lawyer with a laptop and the right infrastructure, doing work that used to require a team of associates.

And the lawyers who will define that future are not the ones who have spent thirty years memorizing precedent. They are the ones who treat legal work like an engineering problem. Who can build a system, configure a workflow, and deploy legal intelligence across a business at scale. We are calling this the legal engineer, and it is about to become one of the most in-demand roles in corporate America.

The Shopify story is instructive here. Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer recounts how Shopify's Head of Engineering Farhan Thawar noticed something unexpected after rolling out AI tools to every team. Most teams barely used them. But one team was all over it. The difference? An intern. "They onboarded the intern and gave the intern his two-week task and the intern was done in a day. And they're like, 'How did you do that?' He's like, 'Oh well I just used AI? What's next?'" Thawar's response was to hire an intern for every single Shopify team. That is why Shopify had a thousand interns.

The same dynamic is coming to legal. The most underappreciated hire in any in-house team right now is the young lawyer who does not know how things have always been done, picks up a tool, and builds something in a day that used to take a week. Those are the people the old guard feel threatened by. Those are the people we are building for.

2. Fixing shadow legal, and why every GC in America should be thinking about this right now

Every employee in your business already has an AI that will answer any legal question, instantly, with complete confidence, and no knowledge of your contracts, your standards, or your actual risk position.

This is the shadow legal problem. It lands on the GC's desk. You cannot send it to a law firm. Most GCs today have no infrastructure to manage it.

Wordsmith is that infrastructure. We will be writing a lot more about this, but if you are a GC and this sounds familiar, you already know what we are talking about.

3. Deploying legal intelligence into American enterprises: with teams that are already ahead

We did not arrive in the US cold. We have been working with in-house legal teams at Coursera, Safelite, Miro, and others for a while now, and the results speak for themselves. 

Corporate America spends more than $100 billion a year on outside legal fees. A significant share of that goes there not because in-house teams lack the expertise, but because they have never had the infrastructure to do the work themselves. 

In many of the conversations we are having with US companies right now, general counsels describe millions of dollars in outside counsel spend that exists purely because their internal teams are simply overwhelmed with reactive work.

That is the gap Wordsmith closes.

We reached a $100 million valuation within our first year, backed by General Catalyst and Index Ventures, and revenue has grown more than 10x since. The American market is the largest legal market in the world and the in-house teams in it deserve a platform built for them. We are here because the problem is real, the demand is clear, and the timing is right.

If you are at Legal Week this week, come find us.