Robin AI is a leader in legal AI and the company’s Legal AI Assistant is used by hundreds of businesses. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Robin AI co-founder and CTO Dr. James Clough to learn more about the company.
Dr. James Clough’s Background
What is Dr. Clough’s background? Dr. Clough said:
“At university, I studied theoretical physics and after graduating went into academia, during my PhD transitioning from physics into AI. I had always been interested in AI but it felt like the right time to move into that field as the deep learning revolution was beginning. In the academic world, things tend to move slowly. If you do some exciting research, you have to write a paper, get it published, and wait for review, for revisions, present it etc; it takes around two years from an initial idea to getting published. But startups were where the real innovation was happening. I connected with my now co-founder, Richard Robinson, a lawyer at a top magic circle law firm, who shared my belief in how machine learning and artificial intelligence could transform professional services like law. Together we created Robin AI.”
Formation Of Robin AI
How did the idea for the company come together? Dr. Clough shared:
“I met Richard during university when we competed against each other in debate competitions. Richard was working in law and realized that the work he was doing was inefficient and that lawyers were behind when it came to adopting new technologies to streamline their operations. Previously the tech wasn’t very good or helpful, but between the two of us, we’d seen the problem firsthand, and knew how we could help fix it.”
“A recent study we commissioned in the U.S. that was focused on general counsels discovered that the majority of their legal teams spent between 31-40% of their time on routine contract review. We started with building proprietary machine learning models that were able to read, understand and label the clauses in contracts before moving to generative AI, which could be used to transform the way lawyers tackle legal work, such as reading and understanding contracts, or helping negotiate the terms of an agreement, and enabling lawyers to focus on human-centric tasks.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Dr. Clough reflected:
“A top contender would be when former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak applauded us for starting a revolution in the legal industry. Everyone was playing the video in our office – that moment helped us realize that Robin AI is going to continue to grow and grow, and that we’re on our way to achieving our goal of being the AI company for legal work.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Dr. Clough explained:
“Robin AI’s copilot aims to make legal work as efficient as possible. The AI copilot can cut the time it takes to review contracts by 85%, allowing businesses’ legal teams to move faster, save money and ultimately invest their time more strategically. When reviewing contracts, Robin AI’s copilot can be used to get AI-suggested edits for specific clauses that align with positions set out in playbooks for different contract types.”
“The contract copilot can also provide summaries, check defined terms, provide ad hoc drafting support, and answer questions quickly about lengthy contracts (including those over 150 pages long).
“In June 2024, we launched Robin AI Reports, a revolutionary product line to speed up M&A, IPO, and other asset transactions, aimed at helping businesses close deals faster.”
In the last year, Robin AI launched an add-in for Microsoft Word, for lawyers to integrate AI into their daily workflow. In early 2024, we also launched a new capability within the copilot to check a contract’s defined terms in seconds, saving legal teams hundreds of hours going through contracts line-by-line.”
“This feature, which also helps reduce the business risks from incorrectly defined terms, is now available to users of the Robin AI contract copilot at no additional cost.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Dr. Clough and the team faced in building the company? Dr. Clough acknowledged:
“The biggest challenge for us was to build an AI system that understands contracts. LLMs do an incredible job at reading and understanding documents, but they don’t understand the specifics that come with contracts. Without this, it would be impossible to achieve the levels of accuracy that any product used by lawyers would need.”
“Our team overcame this challenge by combining proprietary contract data from over 4.5 million legal documents with our own machine learning techniques so that the LLM would be able to interpret and understand contracts. We also took into account the need for customers to load their own playbooks into the system, and added that capability, so that when our AI copilot suggests edits to a contract it does so to that customer’s individual negotiating approach. Lastly, our team of 40+ in-house legal professionals continually reviews the output of the AI system, providing a feedback loop to train and improve Robin AI.”
Evolution Of Robin AI’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Dr. Clough noted:
“AI is developing faster than any technology that has come before it. We launched way back in 2019, and the biggest change has been the public consciousness of LLMs, thanks to ChatGPT. This growing awareness helped boost interest in the application of generative AI in business, including law.”
“Now that customers are more knowledgeable about the tech, they’re far more interested in using it. Secondly, we were a launch partner for Anthropic’s Claude LLM. We were able to integrate it into our system and our own machine learning efforts, combining that with our proprietary contract data with a LLM to really boost our product beyond where we had been able to take it prior to the rise of generative AI. With this boost, along with our recent product launch for defined terms, and with our Microsoft Word add-in, we’re building the AI technology that can transform the entire legal industry, beyond the contract assist that we’re known for.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Dr. Clough cited:
“In January 2024, we announced our $26 million Series B funding round led by Temasek, with other investors including QuantumLight, Plural, and AFG Partners. This raise will help us build on our AI work, encourage growth in North America and Asia, and allow the team to invest in top engineering talent. We have incredible customer and product momentum and a strong appetite from investors to back us. Following our Series A less than a year ago, this funding round was extremely opportunistic, and we were fortunate to have been selective on where we have taken investment from with a particular focus on investors, like Temasek, who can support our strategic goals.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Dr. Clough about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Robin AI’s clients are typically in highly regulated sectors like Asset Management, Financial Services, Life Sciences and Insurance. These businesses are able to gain a competitive advantage by getting deals done faster with AI, all whilst enhancing the accuracy and consistency of the work across their legal teams. For example, an insurance company in London reduced the time their legal team spends on NDAs from 1 hour to 10 minutes. Another client, a big four accounting firm in the North America division, is using our managed services powered by AI. This client sees an average turnaround time of 1.3 hours for the first markup of their NDAs, freeing up hundreds of hours of time in their legal team each month.”
Funding
After asking Dr. Clough about the company’s funding, he revealed:
“To date we have raised over $40 million from top investors including Temasek, Plural, AFG and Quantum Light Capital.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Dr. Clough assessed:
“The legal sector is ripe for AI disruption, and Robin AI’s copilot aims to make legal work as efficient as possible, saving time and cost for businesses and law firms around the world. Ultimately the global legal industry is worth more than one trillion dollars. It’s equal to about one percent of global GDP. We think that AI can both disrupt but also grow that sector as legal work becomes more valuable and more accessible.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Dr. Clough affirmed:
“What sets us apart is our real product, proprietary data, real customers, and real revenues. We’ve been working on applying AI and machine learning to contracts for five years – way before the launch of ChatGPT and all the current excitement around generative AI.”
“When Anthropic approached us to be a launch partner for their LLM, Claude, we saw the opportunity to combine the work we’d been doing and the legal data we had with their LLM to build the smartest contract copilot on the market. We know competitors like Harvey prefer OpenAI’s models but we liked that Anthropic was optimized for safety, there’s a lot of things that they won’t do and in our situation, with our regulated space, that was quite important. There’s a lot of hype around what chatbots and LLMs can do right now. It’s important to stop and take a look at who has a real and tangible product for customers to use, versus a website with a waitlist, and who has proprietary technology versus an application layer over ChatGPT.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Dr. Clough concluded:
“We want to build the AI platform for the legal sector – a service that deeply understands every aspect of the legal function, from drafting contracts, researching case law to explaining legal concepts, and our AI will help people tackle every legal task.”
