Rally, the St. John’s maker of process automation software for law firms, is incorporating technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence non-profit OpenAI into its software platform to help lawyers draft contracts.

Spellbook is Rally’s new tool for auto-generating contract clauses using OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, which is capable of writing prose largely indistinguishable from that created by humans.

The system uses the countless examples of contracts accessible online, along with law firms’ own archives, to generate legal clauses in response user-inputted topic prompts.

“Spellbook is really designed to be a superpower for legal professionals who draft contracts,” said Rally CEO Scott Stevenson in an interview. “Maybe you’re trying to make part of a contract a bit more robust and add some more language, so you give it a new section number and it will output the sections that it thinks the contract is missing.

“It will look at the whole rest of the context of your contract, and it will say … ‘What are the most likely things to come next in this contract?’”

OpenAI, created in 2015 by a team of co-founders that included Elon Musk and former Y Combinator President Sam Altman, is a world leader in deep learning — a form of artificial intelligence that thinks using brain-like “neural networks.” The organization’s stated goal is to foster the development of “friendly,” meaning pro-social, AI.

Rally, meanwhile, sells software to help lawyers share documents among themselves and their clients, as well as communicate with clients about their cases. Stevenson previously said Rally’s growth has been bolstered by the shift to remote work.

The system is sold to law firms using a SaaS model, with three pricing tiers. The cheapest option costs US$99 per month, with the most expensive clocking in at US$999 for a version that includes real-time messaging with clients and e-signature support for both lawyers and clients.

Spellbook, meanwhile, is in beta testing and Rally has launched an early access waitlist.

“We're slowly opening up the gates, now, as we gain confidence and tune the technology, and also work with OpenAI on all the checks and balances we have in place to make sure that the technology is used properly,” said Stevenson.

He added that an important step in integrating GPT-3 into Rally has been to create a front end compatible with widely used office software, such as Microsoft word.

Also bolstering Spellbook’s appeal to law firms is its ability to quickly extract key data, such as renewal dates and data privacy requirements, from existing contracts for easy reference.

Stevenson warned, though, that contracts drafted with the help of Spellbook still need to be carefully reviewed by a human for potential problems — the software can help lawyers work faster, but not replace them.

“We are very wary of how you can generate a really good-looking legal section that might have buried in it some risks or danger,” said Stevenson.

That is also why Spellbook will be available only to law firms and not the general public.

Now, Rally is looking to ramp up its business development efforts, including by hiring a new senior marketer. The company so far has 14 employees and Stevenson says the team is “well-capitalized” after quietly raising a round of seed funding near the end of last year.

About 80 percent of Rally’s clients are in the United States, which boasts the world’s largest market for legal services at nearly half-a-trillion dollars annually, and Stevenson plans to continue focusing on that market as Rally prepares to raise a Series A round late next year.