AI Contracts Company SimpleDocs Acquires Law Insider and Its Extensive Library of Contracts and Clauses
Content is the raw material for generative AI, so it makes sense that an AI-powered contract automation platform would want to acquire what is considered the largest database of contracts and clauses in the world.
This is exactly what happened today when SimpleDocsa company with an AI contract drafting, review and review platform, has acquired Insider to lawwhich claims to host 5 million contracts and 20 million clauses spread across more than 50 languages.
“By combining cutting-edge legal AI with the world’s largest database of contracts and clauses, we are building a future where every project is grounded in precedent, every review is compared to market standards, and every automation reflects precisely configured negotiation positions,” said Preston ClarkCEO of SimpleDocs and co-founder of both companies.
“The result is contract automation that delivers unmatched accuracy, quality and ROI. »
The acquisition creates one of the largest global communities of contract professionals, the company claims, with millions of monthly users and more than 12,000 customers combined.
(Pictured above: Electra Japonas, Preston Clark, Jordan Trevino and Ali Waqar.)
A long-term vision
The acquisition represents the culmination of a long-term strategy for Clark, who launched Law Insider in 2009 with the vision that its government contracting data would eventually become the basis for something bigger in legal technology.
With the rise of legal AI and its application to contracts, he saw the opportunity in 2023 to launch SimpleDocs as a “sister company” focused on contract automation for in-house teams and law firms.
“It was always about getting to that day,” Clark told me in an interview for my LawNext podcast that airs next week. “It was always about bringing them together.”
Although the two companies shared Clark as a co-founder, they operated as separate companies, with separate management and product teams.
That changed last March, when Law Insider launched an AI-powered contract drafting, review, and review tool for its global community of 1.2 million registered users, which it developed in partnership with SimpleDocs and based on its technology.
According to Clark, the first 90 days of this partnership “exceeded all expectations,” with adoption by more than 5,000 active users in 20 countries and validation of both channel-market fit and time-to-value. That success made the decision to merge inevitable, he said.
AI based on precedents
In announcing the acquisition, SimpleDocs positions it as “setting a new standard in contract automation.” This standard, Clark told me in our LawNext interview, focuses on accuracy and configuration, bridging what he sees as a gap between generic AI tools and truly valuable legal AI.
“The difference between a successful or well-tailored legal AI and just Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera, is configuring it to your exact use case,” Clark said. This means configured playbooks and workflows that reflect the exact processes: what to reject, what to accept, how to spot, and what standard comments to use.
But SimpleDocs goes beyond just customer-specific configuration, Clark said. By integrating Law Insider’s database of previous contracts, the platform can now benchmark itself against market standards – identifying missing clauses, flagging non-standard terms, and comparing language to what is typical in the industry.
“The idea that AI can now do this automatically for them alongside Microsoft Word or in the browser environment is very powerful,” Clark said. When he discussed this feature with customers during pre-acquisition conversations, he said, their response was an immediate nod.
Quality over quantity
Clark acknowledged that just having massive data collection does not automatically mean having the best data. The key, he explained, is to add “a layer of intelligence and intent” to filter data appropriately.
“There’s still work to be done in this area,” Clark said, noting that SimpleDocs will now focus on filtering Law Insider’s data with greater precision to create actionable insights into what is truly the market standard — not just what happens frequently.
Law Insider has spent years developing standard language approximations for different types of agreements and clauses. Now the task is to refine that with even more intent to make the data more useful within SimpleDocs’ AI platform, he told me.
How it works in practice
The acquisition will result in a combined offering that will operate in two environments: a web-based writing tool and a Microsoft Word add-in (the company’s existing SimpleAI product) for editing and editing.
In the browser-based authoring environment, users will be able to compare the language they generate to market standards, both at the contract and clause level. The system will show which clauses are missing and how the included clauses compare to market standards.
In Microsoft Word, when reviewing third-party agreements, users will benefit from two levels of analysis: their own configured playbook defending internal positions, as well as precedent-based scoring at the clause and contract level with proposed changes.
“If this agreement is so far out of line or if the counterparty surreptitiously tried to inject something here that I didn’t even know to check because it’s so inappropriate to be in this agreement, Law Insider precedent will catch it, flag it and propose a change against it,” Clark explained.
Legal Engineering
Last year, Law Insider acquired oneNDA, an organization that had developed an open source contract standard for nondisclosure agreements, and last February it launched oneSaaS, a standardized template for cloud services agreements.
After this acquisition, the founder of oneNDA, Electra Japonasjoined Law Insider as general counsel, and she now takes on that role at the combined companies. She will oversee the expansion of the company’s legal engineering function, including the design of playbooks and workflows aimed at improving contract automation for the company’s legal teams.
See my interview with Japonas about the acquisition:
This legal engineering function will be critical as the company moves forward, Clark said, because despite advances in AI, proper implementation still requires significant effort.
“If a vendor says you just upload a document and your playbook is completely set up and it’s evaluated perfectly, it’s categorically and inherently imperfect,” he said.
Besides Japonas, other members of the executive management are Jordan Trevinoco-founder of SimpleDocs and chief technology officer, and Ali Waqaralso co-founder of SimpleDocs and COO. Clark remains CEO.
Market positioning
The company says SimpleDocs is one of the fastest growing legal AI platforms and provides contract software to thousands of legal teams around the world. Its flagship products, SimpleAI and SimpleAI Repository, are used by large public and multinational companies, including PwC, BitGo and dbt Labs.
Clark said Law Insider represents one of the largest global communities of contracts professionals, with millions of monthly users and more than 12,000 clients combined.
Clark sees his main competitors as Spellbook and Robin AI, and he aims to make SimpleDocs “the de facto third player in the market.”
Clark believes the legal AI contracts market represents a rare “new moment” – a new category where there is budget available, C-level urgency and everyone is buying for the first time.
Stay independent
Both Law Insider and SimpleDocs were bootstrapped and profitable. When asked if the company plans to seek outside investment in order to expand, Clark expressed hope that it won’t be necessary.
“I think we have to play by different rules if we’re not raising capital,” he said. “We can pursue different outcomes. We can price more competitively. We can stay more focused on the use cases that are profitable and make our customers happiest.”
While acknowledging that market forces could eventually require outside capital, Clark said he would prefer not to and believes they can build a major, well-run business with their own capital.
Looking to the future
Customers can expect to see the fruits of this acquisition soon, Clark told me. Some features enabled by the combined engineering and product teams will be released gradually in the coming weeks. Deeper “what’s the market” benchmarking features that require sophisticated filtering of Law Insider’s database are targeted for this quarter or next, Clark said.
The Law Insider website and database will continue to be publicly available through lawinsider.com, with existing free users and paid subscribers able to continue their current plans and access optional AI upgrades, including browser-based writing and review tools integrated with Microsoft Word and powered by SimpleDocs.
Clark believes this is just the beginning. Beyond immediate contract drafting and review, it envisions addressing related needs for obligation management, alerting, routing, self-service access, and approval workflows – essentially reimagining contract lifecycle management as “much more unbundled and much more AI-native.”
“I’m just excited to show the world how hard we work and how much our customers influence the roadmap,” Clark said. “I look forward to having a conversation about this a year from now, when we see our NPS score and our retention numbers, when we see our adoption curve.”
