Toronto-based legal AI company Spellbook has added former Shopify and Atlassian chief technology officer Jean-Michel Lemieux to its team as it looks to scale its contract automation platform for the AI era.
Lemieux has joined Spellbook in the newly created role of Executive Individual Contributor, a position the company says is designed for AI-native companies where technical leadership, product development and operational execution increasingly overlap.
Spellbook, which describes itself as AI infrastructure for contracts, says its platform is now used by more than 4,500 in-house teams and law firms. The company launched one of the first generative AI tools for lawyers in 2022 and has since grown into one of Canada’s most prominent legal AI startups.
According to Spellbook, the new role will see Lemieux work across product, engineering, go-to-market and internal systems rather than lead a single department.
“AI companies need new organizational shapes,” said Scott Stevenson, CEO of Spellbook. “The old model optimized around managing functions, but AI collapses those boundaries.”
Lemieux previously helped scale Shopify and Atlassian from growth-stage companies through their IPOs. He has also been an investor and advisor to Spellbook for the past year, during which the company was recognized with the Rocketship Award as Canada’s fastest-growing company.
“Contracts are the APIs of the real world – every transaction runs on them,” said Lemieux. “I’m joining this exceptional team full-time to help accelerate execution across the entire company, from code and product to operations and strategy.”
Spellbook says its broader mission is to modernize the $1 trillion transactional legal market by making contract workflows faster and more intelligent. The company is backed by investors including Khosla Ventures, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Inovia Capital, The Legaltech Fund, Bling Capital and Moxxie Ventures.