As more legal work moves online and clients expect faster, easier access to legal expertise, London-based legaltech Genie AI is focused on bringing practical tools and AI-powered support to help lawyers and businesses work more efficiently.
Led by CEO Rafie Faruq, Genie AI has developed SuperDrafter, a browser-based legal drafting tool that’s designed to replace traditional software like Microsoft Word while giving users full control over their documents and data.
In this week’s In Profile, Faruq explains how Genie AI’s tools aim to solve challenges like document editing bottlenecks and accessibility, and shares his views on the future of legal work in an industry that’s often risk-averse to change.
Tell us more about your company and its purpose
Today, Genie AI is one of the world’s most advanced legal AI Agent aimed at business professionals and in-house lawyers in businesses. We have over 130,000 companies using us all over the world, including the UK, US, Europe and in Asia, and more than 250 companies join the platform every day as we become the world’s trusted platform to do business and legal transactions.
The aim for Genie is to significantly transform the legal industry on a global scale, ensuring global commerce happens more efficiently and all businesses can access legal services at a reasonable price.
What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?
Our significant investment rounds with Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures for $20million – particularly given Khosla Venture’s early investment in OpenAI which gives us real pedigree in terms of AI access. I’ve actually just returned from the Khosla CEO Summit.
Other recent milestones are Genie surpassing 100,000 companies as users, and the creation of over 150,000 drafted documents.
Being selected for a government trade mission representing the Ministry of Justice in New York and Chicago earlier this year and Genie being named a Sunday Times ‘Best Places To Work’ are also achievements, as we were the only AI small business included on the list.
How did you get into your industry?
Nitish Mutha (CTO and co-founder) and I started on our MSc in Machine Learning (AI) courses at UCL and were lucky enough to be taught by Google DeepMind. I also wrote my thesis on Generative AI eight years ago in 2017 a couple of years before the first GPT model was released, specifically on generating text which was most applicable to legal contracts. I recognised the biggest social and ethical impact we could have with those algorithms was with legal documents – the lifeblood of human and business relationships.
What’s the best thing about working in your industry?
The fact that law affects everyone, and so we get to have a social impact and work toward making a previously inaccessible industry accessible to everyone. So the potential impact is large. For me, the greater mission is to harness technology for good.
What frustrates you most about your industry?
Probably the fact that companies can be risk averse when trying out new technology, especially when it comes to law.
Ultimately AI is going to fully automate the legal departments of the future but companies are not yet set up for that, so our work is going to be transitioning lawyers to the new world, and that could be a challenging process but I think we can do it in a way that maintains jobs and increases the work output massively.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
After university, where I studied Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics, I worked by day for a Japanese investment bank as a bond and derivatives trader, and by night, created my first business with my flatmate: a viral charity donation company that accrued 10,000 users and provided £50,000 in donations.
That experience working in finance and trading, economics and a previous tech startup have all taught me skills I can cross fertilise those learnings into law. I’ve also got that lived experience of working in high pressure environments, so being a founder comes as a natural continuation.
What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
The one that comes to mind is hiring mistakes. The company you make is the team you hire, so the biggest mistake I’ve made in the past was not being vigorous enough when hiring. We’ve changed that now and try to meet everyone in person wherever possible with multiple stages of interview. So in that way, the mistakes have enabled us to strengthen our process substantially.
What has the future got in store for your company?
We want to build the autonomous legal departments for the future AI companies and this will give every company access to world class legal services at a fraction of the cost.
Our biggest strength is that because we built the proprietary legal editor in the browser, we’ve been able to acquire over 150,000 docs and over five million clause revisions. Data which gives us the unique and unfair advantage of drafting the very best legal contracts.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
The jobs of today won’t be the jobs of tomorrow. The expert layer will remain, but in the future, we won’t work in a sense of servitude. In the future, work will be passion based.
