Spellbook, the St. John’s maker of AI-driven tools for lawyers, has announced a new product for in-house counsels – the lawyers whose only client in the enterprise they work for.

This week, the company – which has raised more than $40 million in equity funding in the past two years – launched Playbooks, a product that uses artificial intelligence to reduce tedious tasks common to in-house lawyers.

In developing the product, the Spellbook team worked with about 160 in-house legal teams of major enterprises, and learned that they all have sets of rules that must apply to all their documents, such as the thousands of non-disclosure agreements they work on each year. Playbooks can read a Word document and mark it up just as a lawyer would, saving countless hours of tedious work.

“We found that there was a big need for AI that was personalized and consistent,” said Spellbook Co-Founder and CEO Scott Stevenson in an interview, adding that the variability that works well for law firms wasn’t quite right for in-house teams. “Playbooks gives them the consistency and customization they need.”

The product is already being used by the legal teams of such corporations as Nestlé, Crocs, Fender guitars, BDO Unibank, and WSP Global Consulting.

Stevenson said Spellbook was the first company to develop an AI product that would draft and review legal documents like contracts for law firms. Since its founding in 2018, the company has raised tens of millions of venture capital and increased its staff to about 70. Its product is used by thousands of law firms.

Since the company began, the AI space has become fiercely competitive with new entrants and products appearing regularly. Stevenson said Spellbook keeps ahead of the competition with an iron-clad devotion to moving quickly to get products out.

“It requires absolutely radical speed,” said Stevenson. “And you need a particular culture, and we think about that a lot. How do you maintain the speed and how do you put your products out there first?”

That culture, Stevenson said, involves bringing in people who spend more time doing than talking, adding that when the team is working on a product he gets involved in the development himself. Borrowing a line from Wayne Gretzky, he also said the company prides itself in skating to where the puck is going to be rather than where it is.

“People are often in disbelief of what we do, and say, ‘Oh, the technology isn’t ready yet,’” he said. “We chop trees with a blunt axe today and pick up the chainsaw when it comes out. I think a lot of people today are spending too much time sharpening the axe.”