Spellbook, the St. John’s legal software-maker that earlier this year raised US$20 million, announced Thursday it will expand its AI offerings with a new, agent-based product.

Artificial intelligence agents are tools that can be assigned tasks, plan how to execute them and then actually perform the assignment, such as by interacting with other software. In an interview, CEO Scott Stevenson said he expects agents to be as transformative to the AI landscape as the advent of commercially viable large language models was.

The software, dubbed Spellbook Associate, is designed to automate tasks that would traditionally be performed by the more junior lawyers at a law firm. It complements the business's eponymous flagship product for drafting contract clauses, as well as Spellbook Reviews, an editing tool.

“We’ve been working on (Spellbook Associate) for about a year, and I think we’re way ahead of the market on this,” said Stevenson, who led the company's successful pivot from a communications and document-sharing platform to an AI tool.

“You can delegate a project, almost to an AI colleague. It will go and figure out all the steps it needs to do, and execute them to get you some final output.”

The idea for Spellbook Associate came from coding tools like Devin AI and Cursor, which have implemented similar functionality for software developers, Stevenson said, continuing a trend of AI tools like large language models being used by coders first.

“I think you always see the technologists adopting things for their own workflows first, and that’s what we see as the signal,” he said. “If the engineers are adopting it, before long, it’s going to come for everything else.”

Associate is designed to interact with other software, such as Microsoft Word, via a Spellbook plugin. The company bills it as well-suited to tasks like searching the contents of a data room for potential issues, as well as creating financing documents and disclosure schedules, among other uses.

In total, Spellbook now works with more than 2,500 law offices and in-house legal teams, up from 1,700 in January and 600 in May of last year.

So far, Spellbook has onboarded 10 clients for Associate to gather feedback, with early access opening for another 30 or 40 companies this week. Stevenson said he expects a wider release by January.

The company has doubled its staff this year for a total of about 60 employees, with plans to reach 80 or 90 by the end of 2024. The January raise, worth about C$27 million at the time, was led by returning investor iNovia Capital and included Thompson Reuters Ventures, the VC arm of one of the world’s largest legal technology companies, Miami-based specialist investors The Legaltech Fund and Halifax's Concrete Ventures, among others.

“Spellbook Associate, we suspect, is going to be a huge driver of growth over the next two years and beyond," said Stevenson. "It’s going to be our key differentiator and unique value that we’re going to have for a while, though the core product is growing very quickly too.”