Enablement Lead

PERSUIT and Wordsmith AI partner to put a dollar value on legal work, wherever it gets done. Wordsmith runs the work that stays in-house. PERSUIT prices what that work was worth. For the first time, in-house legal can show the business a number for the work it keeps, not just invoices for the work it sends out. Every in-house legal team makes the same decision hundreds of times a year. Does this piece of work stay in-house, or does it go to a firm? Most teams make that call on instinct, and find out what it costs when the invoice arrives. Today PERSUIT and Wordsmith AI are announcing a partnership that puts evidence on both sides of that decision. Wordsmith is the system of action for the work in-house teams keep and complete themselves. PERSUIT is the system of intelligence for the work that goes to external providers, covering how it is scoped, sourced, priced, and paid. Connected, they let a legal leader see the real cost and capacity of both paths before choosing one, instead of reconstructing it afterwards. This matters more now than it did two years ago. AI has changed what an in-house team can absorb, which means the make-or-buy line has moved and nobody has repriced it. The teams getting this right are not simply sending less work out. They are sending the right work out, properly scoped, to the providers best suited to it, at a price they can defend to a CFO. What none of them can do yet is put a number on the work they kept. "Wordsmith helps us manage more work internally, while PERSUIT helps ensure the work we send to external counsel delivers value. Historically, those have been separate decisions. Connecting the two should give legal teams like ours a more joined-up view of what work is best kept in-house and what is best outsourced." said Bruce Breckenridge, General Counsel at BT Group. "For twenty years in-house legal has been measured by what it spends, never by what it delivers. Half the value a legal team creates is the work it decided not to send out, and nobody could ever put a number on it. Now we can, because we have ten years of data on what that work costs in the market. Wordsmith does the work. We price it. That is the difference between walking into a board meeting with a budget and walking in with a return." said Jim Delkousis, CEO and Founder of PERSUIT. "Outside counsel decisions get made by default, not by design. Most legal teams don't have a front door for incoming work, so requests defaulted outside. Wordsmith is that front door: the capacity to take in more of what legal faces. We give legal teams the context to understand what the business actually needs, so they know what to send externally. PERSUIT prices what goes out. That's the difference between a business that waits on legal, and one that moves faster because of it." says Ross McNairn, CEO and co-founder of Wordsmith. What the partnership enables. The integration connects the two platforms across the life of a legal request. Wordsmith captures requests from across the business via email, Slack and Teams and turns them into structured legal work, resolving what it can against approved playbooks, for example, and bringing in a lawyer, with the groundwork done, when a matter needs judgment. When a matter is a candidate for outside counsel, PERSUIT data informs the decision at the point it is made. Teams see benchmark pricing for the matter type and jurisdiction, the providers best placed to run it, and the fee structures comparable work has been priced on. From there they can open a direct engagement or a competitive request through PERSUIT. Persi by PERSUIT, the AI layer running across the PERSUIT workflow, supplies the commercial intelligence behind those answers. Work that stays inside stays managed in Wordsmith. Work that goes out is managed in PERSUIT. For the first time, both sit in one connected picture. Putting a value on the work that stays in-house When Wordsmith resolves a matter inside the business, PERSUIT can price what that matter would have cost externally, drawn from comparable proposals for the same matter type and jurisdiction. The output is a dollar figure attached to work that has never carried one. PERSUIT prices only work with genuine external comparables in its data, so the figure reflects a market price that firms actually quoted, not an assumed rate. The same intelligence applies to any platform that changes where legal work gets done. Wordsmith is the first platform for in-house legal to have its efficiency claims priced against real market data, not just adoption metrics. PERSUIT is opening the same capability to others. The evidence. PERSUIT is the platform many of the world's largest companies use to source, price and manage external legal spend, including SAP, IBM, BT Group, Heineken, UBS and Mastercard. Across more than $25 billion of real proposal data, teams running a first competitive process see average savings of 26% per matter. SAP reached a three-year savings target in nine months. Wordsmith serves more than 500 in-house teams, including BT, Canva, Starling Bank, Sage and the Financial Times, and has raised more than $100 million to date. Revenue has grown more than 14x in the past year. A survey of Wordsmith customers found in-house teams reduced external counsel spend by more than 25% on average after adopting the platform. At Belron, VP Legal Operations Jessica Vander Ploeg reports over $400,000 saved in external counsel spend in the first three months. About PERSUIT. PERSUIT is the system of intelligence for external legal spend. Five connected workflows, covering intake and routing, sourcing and scope, firm, panel and rate, unbilled spend management, and eBilling, with Persi by PERSUIT running across all of them as an AI layer. Underneath sits ten years of pricing intelligence: more than $25 billion of proposal data across 16,000 matters and 50,000 law firm proposals. Headquartered in New York, PERSUIT works with hundreds of enterprise legal teams and more than 4,800 law firms, including 100% of the AmLaw 200 and Global 200. Learn more at persuit.com. About Wordsmith AI. Wordsmith is the system of action for in-house legal. It codifies a legal team's judgment and carries work from request to resolution: taking in requests from across the business, routing them with context, resolving routine work with AI agents and approved playbooks, bringing in lawyers when judgement is needed, and recording every step as it happens. Wordsmith is backed by Index Ventures, Highland Europe, General Catalyst, Intact Private Capital and FT Ventures, has raised more than $100 million to date, and serves more than 500 in-house teams. Learn more at wordsmith.ai. Media contacts. PERSUIT: [email protected] Wordsmith AI: [email protected] FEATURE SECTION BOOK A DEMO Ready to transform your legal department? See how the world's leading legal teams are building the future of in-house legal.

Adyen chooses Wordsmith to bring trusted legal AI across the teams that manage risk. Adyen, the financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, has chosen Wordsmith as its legal AI platform. Adyen is one of the world's largest financial technology companies, and a regulated credit institution holding banking licences across the EU, the UK and the US. Its platform processes over €1.3 trillion in payments annually, giving businesses the data they need to make informed decisions.

Wordsmith appoints Simon McCarthy as VP of Transformation. Legal technology veteran joins Wordsmith to build its enterprise transformation capability as AI reshapes how legal teams operate. Wordsmith AI Ltd is announcing today that Wordsmith AI Ltd has appointed Simon McCarthy as VP of Transformation, bringing one of the legal technology industry's most experienced transformation leaders into its business as Wordsmith AI Ltd expand its work with global enterprises. Simon's experience in legal transformation. Simon joins Wordsmith AI Ltd with 15 years of experience in legal technology and transformation and has worked across more than 150 enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) and legal transformation programmes spanning financial services, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, healthcare and other complex industries. He joins Wordsmith AI Ltd having worked across every side of enterprise legal transformation: leading change from within corporate legal teams, building legal technology products, advising organisations as a consultant, and helping technology vendors deliver complex transformation programmes. Wordsmith AI Ltd is welcoming Simon from ContractPodAI, where he most recently led Enterprise Transformation. Previously, he was Director of Contracting Transformation Services at KPMG UK and Director of Product Management at Exari, which was subsequently acquired by Coupa. He also founded CLM Nexus, an independent advisory business focused on CLM strategy and transformation. Why transformation matters now. Wordsmith AI Ltd is making this appointment as generative and agentic AI changes both what legal technology can do and what enterprises need from their technology providers. As AI platforms become increasingly powerful and configurable, Wordsmith AI Ltd see the challenge for legal teams shifting from selecting software features to deciding where and how AI should change the way legal work gets done: which processes to redesign, what to automate, where human judgement should remain, how to manage risk, and how to turn new capabilities into measurable business outcomes. As Simon explains, this changes both the questions legal teams need to ask and the role technology providers must play. "The technology has reached a point where it can be configured to do extraordinary things. The hardest question is no longer simply what the product can do - it's what we should do with it. AI is blurring the traditional boundary between product and transformation. Vendors need to understand the operating model they're helping to create, not just the technology they're deploying. And that means working differently with both customers and partners, bringing together deep product knowledge, transformation expertise and the specialist capabilities needed to make change successful at enterprise scale." Ross McNairn, its co-founder and CEO, said the appointment reflects its ambition to take greater responsibility for the outcomes its technology creates. "We're not asking legal teams to buy another piece of software. We're giving them the ability to fundamentally rethink how legal work happens across their organisation. That makes transformation expertise incredibly important. Simon has spent his career on the customer, consulting, product and vendor sides of this problem. He understands how to connect technology to operating-model change and measurable outcomes and how vendors, customers and partners need to work together to make that change stick." Building its enterprise transformation capability. Simon will lead its enterprise transformation capability, working with its customers and partners from the earliest stages of strategy and solution design through implementation, adoption and value realisation. Through this function, Wordsmith AI Ltd'll help enterprises understand their current maturity, define the target operating model for AI-enabled legal services, identify and prioritise high-value use cases, redesign processes, establish governance and define clear measures of success. Wordsmith AI Ltd is making this appointment after a period of rapid growth. Wordsmith AI Ltd recently announced a $70m Series B and subsequent $14m Series B extension. Wordsmith AI Ltd has grown revenue 14x year-on-year, and more than 500 customers now use its platform, including BT, FT, Sage, Starling, Deliveroo, Canva and Safelite. FEATURE SECTION BOOK A DEMO Ready to transform your legal department? See how the world's leading legal teams are building the future of in-house legal.