Spellbook
AI contract review and drafting for transactional lawyers, delivered primarily as a Microsoft Word add in and also working in Google Docs. Core features are Review for redlining against a firm's standards, Draft for clauses and documents from scratch or from saved precedent, Playbooks for encoding review standards, Ask for cited answers, and Compare for benchmarking a clause against thousands of similar agreements. Spellbook Associate is a multi document agent for longer matters. An Autonomous Contract Management product covering intake through signed contract search is in early access. Founded in St John's, Newfoundland in 2018 as Rally and rebranded to Spellbook in 2022. The architecture is grounding rather than fine tuning: general purpose models are connected to proprietary market data and required to fetch and cite. Named exclusive AI partner of the Canadian Bar Association.
Capability grades
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
The models are the product. Review, Draft, Ask, Compare and the Associate agent are all generative capabilities delivered through a Word add in that exists to carry them. The company pivoted its whole business to generative AI in 2022, rebranding from Rally to Spellbook. Remove the models and there is no product, only an empty add in.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Grounding is real and documented with the method described, short of published figures. The vendor states its architecture explicitly and unusually: it does not fine tune, it connects general purpose models to proprietary market data and requires them to fetch and cite rather than rely on learned patterns, on the stated reasoning that putting documents into a model's long term memory encourages hallucination. Compare benchmarks a clause against a stated corpus of more than 2,300 contract types and explains why differences matter, and Ask is published as producing answers with citations. The vendor also publishes educational material on hallucination risk aimed at its own users. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: any accuracy figure, hallucination rate, test set or evaluation for its own product. Worth noting the CEO has publicly questioned third party benchmarking studies of legal AI tools while the company publishes no measurement of its own.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
A real written commitment that the models work alongside a supervising lawyer, with a genuine review surface, short of the full control structure. Associate is described as the first AI agent that can work through multi document legal matters with your oversight, which states the oversight position in the product's own headline claim. The delivery model is itself the review mechanism: output arrives as tracked redlines inside a Word document the lawyer accepts or rejects clause by clause, which is a more concrete control point than most of this market publishes. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: what the agent decides on its own within a matter, the threshold at which it stops, and what happens after an output is wrong.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
Real deployment evidence with substance, short of the full A bar. Multiple named customer stories are published with individually attributed detail, including Dropbox with a named associate general counsel on video, Panasonic on saving three weeks building an RFP process, KMSC Law with a named partner, Alturas Capital Partners, Elevare Law and Westaway with a named managing partner. The logo wall names large enterprises including eBay, Fender, Crocs, Franklin Templeton, Hapag Lloyd, Valentino and DirecTV, and the vendor states more than 4,500 legal teams across 80 plus countries. Figures appear but attach loosely: a named partner states Spellbook helps him bill an extra hour a day, and Panasonic's three weeks is a stated saving. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a dated case study carrying figures with a method a reader can assess.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
Substantive published commitments, short of the full picture. Zero data retention agreements are stated as negotiated with both named model providers, OpenAI and Anthropic, with the mechanism described precisely: customer data in requests and responses is not persisted and exists only in memory to process a request. That is a stronger and more specific statement than most of this market publishes. Encryption, SSO through Microsoft Entra with enforced MFA, and audit controls are stated. Two gaps hold this off an A. Attorney client privilege and work product handling is not addressed directly in located material. Segregation between users or matters inside a customer is not documented, and for a firm facing product the applicable standard under the amended band is matter level walls.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point.
The audience is unambiguous, transactional lawyers at firms and in house teams, with a signup form that asks a prospect to confirm they are a legal professional and offers no path for non lawyers. The vendor publishes educational material engaging with a lawyer's duty of competence and the obligation to verify AI output. What was not located, after checking the site, the solutions pages, the published terms of service and the learning hub on 29 Aug 2026, is a published position on the advice line, on supervision duties as distinct from competence, or on jurisdiction limits, despite the product being sold in more than 80 countries.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behaviour: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
A published governance framework with real substance and independent validation, short of testing results or a named owner. The vendor commissioned and publishes an independent legal opinion from CMS Law on its classification under the EU AI Act, states it was assessed as low risk, and makes the full opinion letter downloadable from its trust portal along with the controls implemented for that classification. Commissioning an outside law firm to classify your own AI system and then publishing the letter is a governance artifact rather than a principles page, and no other vendor on this index has published one. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a named internal owner of model governance, published pre release testing results for model behaviour, or any disclosure about uneven output across matter types, parties or populations.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
Substantive published policy covering most of the ground, short of the full set. Published and specific: zero data retention at the model layer with both providers named and the mechanism described, a complete third party subprocessor list with processing locations in the trust portal, AWS named as primary cloud provider, storage and processing locations stated as Canada and the US, access control through Microsoft Entra so a customer enforces its own authentication and MFA policy, breach notification addressed through implemented HIPAA Breach Notification rule controls with signed business associate agreements downloadable, and a published vulnerability disclosure policy. What holds this off an A is deletion, which the A band requires alongside the rest: searched the security page and FAQ, the published terms of service, the privacy policy and the trust portal entry point on 29 Aug 2026 and located no stated retention period for the vendor's own storage of documents, prompts and outputs, no customer control over that window, and no deletion commitment. This record's own prompt-and-output-retention signal row records the same gap.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
Liability is addressed only through published terms a buyer can read in advance, without a position on the exposure the product creates. Terms of service, a privacy policy and a refund policy are all published openly, which is more than several vendors on this index manage, and the refund policy is an unusual published commercial commitment. But searched those documents, the security page and the trust portal entry point on 29 Aug 2026 and located no indemnity running to the customer for third party claims arising from output, no warranty on output, no stated liability cap figure and no insurance position. The vendor will sign a business associate agreement for protected health information, which is a regulatory undertaking rather than recourse for wrong output.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
Real integrations exist and are documented, short of depth. The product is delivered as a Microsoft Word add in and also runs in Google Docs, which is the deepest possible integration into the surface where transactional drafting actually happens rather than a connector alongside it. A dedicated integrations page is published, and the ACM product describes contracts arriving from email, Slack and Salesforce. Authentication integrates with Microsoft Entra. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: legal specific document management connectors such as iManage or NetDocuments, and per integration documentation describing what moves in which direction and what an administrator configures.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
Deployment model is stated clearly with partial residency detail. The vendor publishes that AWS is the primary cloud provider and that customer data is stored and processed in data centres in Canada and the US, with a full list of subprocessors and their locations in the trust portal. That is a real residency statement naming both jurisdictions. What is missing is customer choice and tenancy: no selectable region, no single tenant or private deployment option, and no statement of the tenancy model was located as of 29 Aug 2026. For a vendor selling into more than 80 countries, the absence of an EU or UK processing option is a live buyer question the site does not address.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
Certification is real and stated with an open route to the evidence, short of published scope. SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA are both named, and the badges on the home page link directly to named, dated resources in the trust portal rather than sitting as decorative images, which is a materially better pattern than most of this market and is why this is not a C. The trust portal is at a stable URL and carries downloadable documents including business associate agreements and the EU AI Act opinion letter. Under the three tier test this is a self serve request flow rather than a sales gate. What was not located as of 29 Aug 2026 is the audit coverage period, the scope, or the name of the auditing firm.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
The models underneath are named, their providers identified, where they run is stated, and the commercial terms binding them are disclosed. The vendor names GPT-5 and Claude Opus as the models powering the product on its own home page, names OpenAI and Anthropic as the providers, states the zero data retention agreements negotiated with each and what that means technically, names AWS as the primary cloud provider, states processing locations as Canada and the US, and publishes a complete third party subprocessor list at a stable trust portal URL. Naming the specific model versions in marketing copy is rare and is what a customer inheriting the dependency actually needs. Short of the very top only in that no explicit commitment to notify customers before the model supply chain changes was located, though the subprocessor list is the mechanism through which such a change would surface.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
Pricing is gated behind a demo request while tier names and feature splits are published, so the shape is visible and the number is not. The pricing page publishes two named tiers, Law Firms and In House Teams, itemises what each includes, states that pricing is structured around the number of team members on a licence, and confirms a 7 day free trial with extended trials available for larger organisations. Free access for academic institutions is published. So a buyer learns the unit of charge and the packaging without a sales call. No figure appears at any tier, and the only route to one is a demo booking. Checked the pricing page, the home page and the footer on 29 Aug 2026.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
Segment and practice coverage is described with substance, short of the boundaries. Two buyer segments carry dedicated pages, law firms and in house legal, and six industries have their own: energy, healthcare, financial services, technology, manufacturing, and retail and consumer goods. Firm size is addressed in the trial form from 1 to 10 through 200 plus, and the vendor states more than 4,500 teams across 80 plus countries. Practice focus is stated clearly and repeatedly as transactional and commercial legal work rather than claimed broadly, which is a real self limit. Short of an A because litigation appears as an option in the signup form while nothing on the site describes litigation support, and because no statement of which practice areas or firm sizes the product is not built for was located.
Legal Signals
What each signal meansA signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
A public policy or trust page states no training on customer content, with no matching term located in the published agreement.
The vendor states plainly that zero data retention means its model providers never learn from, train on or store customer data, and the security FAQ describes the mechanism: agreements negotiated with OpenAI and Anthropic under which customer data in requests and responses is not persisted and exists only in memory to process a request. The commitment as located covers the model providers specifically and sits on a public security page and pricing page rather than in a term of the published customer agreement, which was searched on 29 Aug 2026. No separate statement was located as to whether the vendor itself trains on customer content, as distinct from its providers.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
Retention is acknowledged in public materials with no stated period.
At the model provider layer the answer is specific and zero: data in requests and responses is not persisted and exists only in memory. That is a real published retention position for the part of the pipeline buyers ask about most. What was not located as of 29 Aug 2026, after checking the security page, the published terms of service, the privacy policy and the trust portal entry point, is any statement of how long the vendor itself retains prompts, documents and outputs in its own systems, whether a customer controls that window, or whether deletion is available. Recorded at the middle value because retention is acknowledged and answered for one layer without a period for the other.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
No located public material addresses walls or matter level segregation.
Searched the security page, the integrations page, the published terms of service and the trust portal entry point on 29 Aug 2026. No vendor material addresses ethical walls or segregation between users or matters. Authentication runs through Microsoft Entra, so a firm enforces its own identity policy at sign in, but that governs who can open the add in rather than what the product may retrieve per user. No legal document management integration was located whose permissions retrieval could inherit at query time. For a product sold to law firms this is the applicable standard and it is not addressed.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
No located term or policy addresses third party requests for customer data.
Searched the published terms of service, the privacy policy, the security page and FAQ, and the trust portal entry point on 29 Aug 2026. No clause committing to notify a customer of a government or law enforcement request for their data was located, and no transparency report was located. This records a search across the published documents that did not surface the clause rather than a reading of every document end to end.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
Coverage is described by jurisdiction with no identification of the underlying corpus.
The corpus here is contract market data rather than primary law, which is the right shape for a transactional product and reads differently against a signal written for case law. Coverage is quantified: Compare benchmarks a clause against a stated more than 2,300 contract types and thousands of similar agreements, and the vendor describes the architecture as fetching from proprietary market data sources and citing them. What is not published is where that market data comes from, on what rights basis it was assembled, or how current it is. Searched the Compare feature page, the clause index, the state of contracts report page and the security pages on 29 Aug 2026.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
No located public material addresses whether authority is checked for subsequent history.
Searched the site, the Ask and Compare feature pages, the learning hub and the help centre entry point on 29 Aug 2026. No material was located addressing whether authority returned carries a treatment signal or whether subsequent history is checked, and no commercial citator licence was located. Noted for context: this is a transactional contract product whose grounding corpus is contract market data rather than case law, so a citator is largely outside its design. The absence is recorded as found, and a reader should weigh it against what the product is for.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behaviour
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located public material addresses what the product does when it cannot ground an answer.
Searched the site, the feature pages, the learning hub and the help centre entry point on 29 Aug 2026. No published material describes what the product does when it cannot ground an answer, and no explicit no answer path or confidence signal exposed to the user was located. The vendor publishes a clear architectural position that models should fetch and cite rather than rely on learned patterns, which is about how an answer is grounded rather than what happens when nothing supports one.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist involving output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record, not a finding about the product.
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming this product has been located as of 29 Aug 2026. Instrument searched: the AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which tracks court decisions worldwide involving AI generated hallucinated content and records the AI tool implicated where it is known. Also checked published 2026 sanctions summaries and secondary sanctions trackers. The entries located name filers, and in some rows other products, rather than this one. This is a statement about the public record on the date shown and not a clearance. Note that this vendor publishes its own editorial content about AI hallucination sanctions, which surfaces in searches for its name and is not a record about the product. Note also that the product is transactional rather than litigation facing, so its output is less likely to reach a court filing in the first place.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Public materials refer to professional responsibility in general terms without naming guidance.
Public materials refer to professional responsibility in general terms without naming guidance. The vendor publishes substantial educational content on hallucination risk that engages with a lawyer's duty of competence and candour to the court and the obligation to verify AI output, and it is named exclusive AI partner of the Canadian Bar Association, which is a relationship with a bar association rather than engagement with its guidance. Searched the site, the learning hub, the blog and the guides and reports index on 29 Aug 2026 and located no engagement with a named ethics opinion, including ABA Formal Opinion 512, any state bar guidance, or any Canadian law society guidance.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Public materials claim time savings without addressing billing or disclosure.
Savings are claimed with nothing published on the client's side of the equation, and unusually the framing runs the other way. A published customer quote from a named partner states the product probably helps him bill an extra hour a day, and the pricing page is headed on boosting profitability, alongside a published return on investment calculator and repeated ten times faster drafting claims. Searched the site, the pricing page, the customer stories and the learning hub on 29 Aug 2026 and located no per matter record of AI assisted work intended for fee purposes, and no guidance on billing, fee or client disclosure treatment. A published claim about billing more hours, in a market where ethics guidance is direct that a lawyer bills for time actually spent, is the sharpest version of this signal on the index so far.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
A current subprocessor or model provider list is published.
A firm can assemble most of what a client AI clause asks for without a sales conversation. Published through a trust portal at a stable URL: a complete third party subprocessor list with processing locations, named model providers with the zero data retention terms binding them, a dated SOC 2 Type II resource, a HIPAA resource, signed business associate agreements from vendors handling protected health information, and an independent EU AI Act classification opinion from CMS Law. Short of the top value because the material is a self serve portal rather than a client facing consent or notification pack the firm could forward as assembled, and no such pack was located as of 29 Aug 2026.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
No located public material addresses court disclosure or verification certification.
Searched the site, the feature pages, the security page and the help centre entry point on 29 Aug 2026. The vendor states audit controls exist and Ask is published as returning answers with citations, but no per document export covering model used, sources retrieved and human verification together was located, and no disclosure or certification support material was located. Noted for context: this is a transactional drafting product whose output is contracts rather than court filings, so a judicial AI disclosure order is less likely to reach it. Recorded as found.