LegalTech Diaries Volume 19
Ross McNairn
CEO
Wordsmith
LegalTech Diaries Volume 19
Ross McNairn
CEO
Wordsmith
You’ve deliberately built Wordsmith for in-house teams rather than law firms, at a time when most legal AI attention goes to the firm side. What do in-house teams need that the firm-focused tools weren’t built to give them?
Every other function in a business has a system built for how it works. Legal usually doesn’t. Work arrives from everywhere: Slack, email, Teams. Too many legal decisions get made by default rather than by design.
Firm tools weren’t built for that. They’re built for firms with many clients. An in-house team has one client: the business. So you need the whole business in view, and each new piece of work starts with full context, like the answer legal gave sales last month.
In-house teams need two things. One front door for the business, with control and visibility for legal. And capacity: a lean team getting routine work handled, so lawyers spend their time where the risk is. Incentives matter too. Firm-first tools make their money from firms. We make money when in-house teams keep more work in-house. You can’t credibly serve both sides, and we chose a side.
Wordsmith became the fastest Scottish company to reach a $100 million valuation while staying, in your words, lean and product-led rather than chasing hype. What did you say no to in order to keep that discipline?
Choosing in-house meant saying no to law firms. Six months in, we turned down a multi-million-dollar law firm deal. At that stage, the temptation is to take it and rationalise it later. We didn’t. We stayed focused on what in-house teams actually need.
That shaped what we didn’t build, too. We skipped the client siloing and deep practice management integrations that law firms run on, and optimised for the tools in-house teams already use instead. Our own legal team runs on Wordsmith, and the rest of the business sends its legal asks through it, so we feel the friction before our customers do. That focus kept us lean while growing revenue 10x year on year.
You’ve built Wordsmith to triage inbound requests from across a business, not just handle matters lawyers already own. What was the hardest part of designing for a workflow that starts before a lawyer even sees it?
The hardest part was that there’s rarely a clear definition of what needs a lawyer and what doesn’t. That line lives in people’s heads. So lawyers end up picking up a lot of work that never needed them, because looking at everything feels safer than missing something. And that instinct isn’t wrong. Time spent on routine requests is a cost, but missing the one request that carries real risk costs far more. So we didn’t try to draw the line ourselves. Legal does. The team decides what agents handle, what gets routed to whom, and what always comes to a lawyer. Intake then applies those rules the moment a request comes in. It’s fewer, better matters, and that’s what lets a lean team keep up.
