Legal AI is rapidly shifting from experimental tooling to core enterprise infrastructure as corporate legal teams face mounting pressure to manage rising workloads without expanding headcount.
Wordsmith is betting that the next phase of legal transformation won’t be built solely for lawyers — but for entire organizations.
The Edinburgh-founded company is expanding into Canada at a moment of regulatory and operational inflection, as in-house teams confront converging pressures from open banking, real-time payments modernization, privacy reform, and accelerating deal cycles. Rather than positioning AI as a standalone assistant for legal departments, Wordsmith embeds company-grounded legal intelligence directly into workplace tools used across sales, procurement, finance, and operations.
CEO Ross McNairn argues the shift is structural: enabling businesses to self-serve on routine legal work while freeing in-house counsel to focus on strategy, risk, and complex matters traditionally pushed to outside firms.
LegalTech.ca spoke with McNairn about Wordsmith’s Canadian expansion, the future of in-house legal, and why governing “shadow legal AI” is becoming a leadership priority.
AI is becoming increasingly common in legal teams. What sets Wordsmith AI apart from other AI solutions on the market?
RM: Most legal AI tools are built for lawyers. Wordsmith is built for the whole business. When a sales rep needs to redline a contract, when a procurement manager has a compliance question, when a finance team is reviewing vendor terms, all of that used to land on the legal team’s desk.
With Wordsmith, those teams get instant and accurate answers inside the tools they already use like Slack, Microsoft 365, whatever AI they’re already using, but governed by the legal team’s own playbooks and standards. Not a generic AI guess – but the legal team’s actual position.
We built Wordsmith specifically for in-house legal teams. Right now, most in-house legal departments are buried in reactive and high-volume work. Every contract, every policy question, every internal request lands on their desk and runs through them. That means the complex, high-value work, like M&A, compliance, or due diligence, often gets sent to outside firms at premium rates, not because the team can’t do it, but because they never get to it. Wordsmith gives them the infrastructure to clear that volume, so they have the capacity to take on work they’ve been outsourcing.
Can you share your journey – what led you to co-found Wordsmith AI and focus particularly on in-house teams?
RM: I trained as a lawyer in the UK. I then left law and spent the next decade building technology at scale. I was at Skyscanner in the years leading up to its $1.7 billion acquisition, and then at Perk where I joined at around $1 million in revenue and helped scale it past $200 million ARR as CPO. Through all of that, I kept seeing the same thing from the other side – legal teams that were the smartest people in the building operating as a bottleneck because they didn’t have the right infrastructure. We started Wordsmith because I understood both sides. I knew what good legal thinking looked like, and I knew what it took to build technology that actually works at scale. In-house teams are at the heart of every business decision. When they’re slow, the whole company is slow. That’s the problem we’re solving.
In-house teams often spend significant time on repetitive, administrative tasks. How can Wordsmith AI help them work smarter and become key drivers of business growth?
RM: The problem isn’t that legal teams are doing administrative work. It’s that they’re doing it without the right tools, so it takes ten times longer than it should. Contract review, drafting, policy questions – this is work that happens thousands of times across a large organization, and it all funnels through the same small team. Wordsmith automates the repetitive layer so that the rest of the business can self-serve on high-volume tasks without waiting for Legal. That’s the unlock. When you take that volume off the legal team’s plate, two things happen: the business moves faster because it’s not queuing for approvals, and the legal team suddenly has capacity to focus on the work that actually requires their expertise.
Wordsmith is embedding Legal AI where the teams work and meeting them in their tools like their CRM, Slack, Word, Teams and more, so the rest of the business can self-serve on legal routine tasks. Our customers already feel this – as for example, Trustpilot already reported an 85% reduction in contract review, and Belron saved $100k in the initial pilot period.
How do you see AI transforming the way law firms and in-house legal teams operate over the next few years?
RM: For in-house legal teams, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. AI handles the volume, which frees the team to do the work that actually matters: advising the business, negotiating deals, or shaping strategy. For the first time, in-house legal has a real path to being one of the highest-return functions in a company. For law firms, it’s a much harder conversation. Their business model is built on billable hours. If in-house teams can do more work themselves, faster and more accurately, there’s simply less work to send outside.
Companies we speak to are actively looking for ways to bring that work back in-house. That’s not a small adjustment, but a structural threat to how law firms make money. Over the next few years, I think we’ll see the day-to-day commercial work move in-house permanently, supported by AI. Law firms won’t disappear, but their role will narrow significantly. The uncomfortable truth for firms is that fully embracing AI means accepting a smaller, less profitable version of the business they know today. The in-house teams that move now will be the ones that define the next decade.
I believe the future is fractional and in-house. Individual relationships matter more than institutional ones, which means power is shifting away from firms and toward individual lawyers. The rise of the super gig economy is already here and a lot of lawyers who embrace it will have a very good future.
Why is now the ideal time for Wordsmith AI to launch in Canada, and what opportunities does the market present?
RM: Canada is at a regulatory tipping point. With open banking, Real-Time Rail, and privacy reform converging, in-house legal teams face an unprecedented workload. We’ve been exploring this with experts like Alina Silvestrovici Paun, former Managing Counsel at TD Bank and Founder of Elite Fintech Law , who highlights how AI is turning legal teams into high-speed generalists, giving them the capacity to move across complex new jurisdictions without the traditional overhead. It’s the ideal moment for Wordsmith to help Canadian teams move faster and lead through this change.
Also, Canadian companies are dealing with the same pressures we see everywhere: more complexity, faster deal cycles, and legal teams being asked to do more without more headcount. That’s the right moment for us to be here. We’re not asking teams to experiment with something unproven, as Wordsmith is already running inside legal departments at companies like Canva, Deliveroo, or BT. What we’re offering Canadian teams is to clear the high-volume work, to free up capacity, and to stop relying on outside firms for things you can do better and faster internally.
What advice would you give Canadian legal leaders about embracing AI responsibly?
RM: The first thing Canadian legal leaders need to understand is that AI is already inside their business whether they’ve sanctioned it or not. Employees are using Gen AI tools to answer legal questions every day, with no knowledge of your contracts, your jurisdiction, or your actual risk position.
We call this shadow legal, and it’s creating unmanaged risk across every team, from sales to procurement to finance. But here’s the positive side of that. This is a solvable problem, and the GCs who get ahead of it now will come out of this moment stronger. The answer isn’t to ban AI, it’s to govern it.
Put the right infrastructure in place and you can turn every AI interaction across your business into one that follows your legal team’s actual standards. Routine questions get handled automatically, complex ones get escalated with full context, and you go from being a reactive firefighter to the strategic centre of your company’s decision-making. That’s the opportunity.