St. John’s legal software startup Spellbook is launching a program to make its artificial intelligence system for contract drafting free to law students as the company looks to dramatically scale up its operation and consolidate triple-digit quarterly revenue growth.

Chief executive Scott Stevenson said in an interview that the student access initiative is in response to requests from professors who expect legal AI to eventually become as commonplace as “a calculator for lawyers.”

Spellbook, previously called Rally, has seen its revenue double this quarter and expects to post similar performance next quarter, Stevenson said. More than 700 legal teams now use the platform, many in the United States.

“Between law students and teachers, we probably had over 100 of those folks coming to us asking for access, and we had no way to deal with it,” said Stevenson. “I think it’s good for the profession and good for us in the long term to get this out there.”

The announcement comes about a month after Spellbook revealed it had raised US$10.9 million from investors including Thomson Reuters, the Toronto data and publishing giant that controls a massive percentage of the legal software market.

Stevenson added, though, that Spellbook will tightly control who can access its software, with professors or students having to submit a proposal to the company explaining their intended use case. The company has so far approved a handful of such deals, slated to begin in September.

The strict approach is the result of concern among some professors and law schools that large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which Spellbook runs on, could be used by students to cheat.

“We’re being very intentional about this,” said Stevenson. “We don't want to be an enemy of these law schools, another tool they're afraid students are using. We want to collaborate with them and be part of the conversation.”

Spellbook’s system can auto-generate contract clauses in response to user-inputted topic prompts. It also draws on sources like Wikipedia for general knowledge and allows users to ask GPT-4 questions about a given document, such as what a contract says should happen in a case of late payment.

“The very passionate professors (about Spellbook) are often the ones who have been in practice themselves,” said Stevenson. “They’ve used this technology, and they’re like, ‘Wow, this is going to totally change how lawyers draft and review contracts, and I’d better get my students prepared for that.’”

So far, Spellbook has 18 employees with plans to quickly expand to a staff of more than 30. Next on the company’s product roadmap will be adding the ability for law firms to train the Spellbook AI on their own internal archives — a key feature in an industry where individual practitioners tend to develop their own specific techniques and practices. Later, users will also be able to ask Spellbook to markup documents by tracking changes or making comments.

“Law is very bespoke,” Stevenson said. “Every lawyer has their own flavour of how they like to draft things.”