Legal professionals often find themselves bogged down in tedious, repetitive tasks, leaving little room for strategic thinking and client engagement. DraftWise, a legal tech startup, recognized this pain point and set out to create a solution that would liberate lawyers from mundane work, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities. To realize this vision, DraftWise turned to Azure AI Foundry Models, seeking cutting-edge AI technology that could transform the way contracts are drafted and negotiated.
Finding the Right AI Foundation
DraftWise explored the extensive range of models available through Azure AI Foundry, ultimately selecting the Cohere model family as the cornerstone of its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system. This strategic choice enabled DraftWise to develop a highly accurate legal AI platform that powers its Smart Draft and Markup solutions. These solutions empower lawyers to dedicate more time to strategic client work, while also boosting developer productivity by an impressive 60% and enhancing search efficiency on a platform fortified with robust security measures.
An AI Lifeline for Data-Drowning Lawyers
When asked about the most fulfilling aspect of contract creation, lawyers often cite the opportunity to be creative and provide clients with innovative strategic counsel. However, the reality is that a significant portion of their time is consumed by repetitive tasks like copying and pasting clauses.
“Lawyers I talk to often refer to themselves as ‘cut-and-paste drones,’” says James Ding, founder and CEO of DraftWise. “Our research across the profession confirms this.” Ding, drawing on his experience leading teams across various industries where privacy, data security, and advanced search capabilities are paramount, recognized the potential for a profound shift in the legal profession. By implementing state-of-the-art generative and search retrieval AI models, lawyers could draft higher-quality contracts more efficiently.
Collaboration and Purpose-Built Solutions
The DraftWise development team meticulously crafted a strategy for bringing their AI-powered contract drafting (Smart Draft) and review (Markup) products to market. Their deep-seated trust in Microsoft, stemming from extensive experience with Microsoft Azure, led them to Azure AI Foundry Models. Within the model catalog, they discovered Cohere’s suite of models: Command for text generation, with Embed and Rerank utilized for search and retrieval.
“Once we knew that we could run Cohere models on Azure, we were sure we’d have the best of both worlds,” explains Ding. This strategic alignment allowed DraftWise to leverage the power of Cohere’s AI models within the secure and scalable Azure environment.
To ensure their solutions truly met the needs of legal professionals, the DraftWise team engaged directly with prospective customers. They discovered a customer base deeply committed to the ideals of their profession. “We knew we could provide the best experience for lawyers by aligning with the tools they use every day and deliver DraftWise convenience from within their current workflow,” says Will Seaton, Chief Customer Officer at DraftWise. This customer-centric approach ensured that DraftWise’s solutions seamlessly integrated into existing legal workflows, maximizing their impact and adoption.
Microsoft’s Role in DraftWise’s Success
Microsoft’s commitment extended beyond providing cutting-edge AI models. The Azure platform offered a perfectly aligned cloud infrastructure and AI toolset. Azure fulfilled DraftWise’s commitment to security and data privacy, coupled with reliability at scale. Ding, having been impressed by the platform’s unified capabilities during his previous role at Palantir, recognizedthe value of Azure’s robust security features.
“Microsoft serves a customer base in highly regulated spaces,” says Ding. “Azure offers reliability, availability, and control over data that our engineers need. And Microsoft offered more model choices than its competitors.” Azure AI Foundry’s robust security measures and scalability ensure that customer data remains safe and that the platform can easily adapt to fluctuating demand.
Aligned with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles, Azure helps DraftWise maintain precise control over which information is collected, stored, and used for training purposes. This commitment to data privacy and security is paramount in the legal industry, where confidentiality is of utmost importance.
Developers could search across more than 1,900 models within Azure AI Foundry Models, then test and evaluate from a preferred pool for the optimal choice. The universally used and publicly documented SDK simplifies model selection and integration. Developers can change models simply by changing configurations.
The Fusion of Microsoft and Cohere
DraftWise strategically selected the Command model for its high-quality text-generation capabilities, which provide a natural, approachable interface to its clause-generation tool within Smart Draft. This intuitive interface allows lawyers to easily generate contract clauses with minimal effort.
The company powers its DraftWise retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system with the Cohere Command, Embed, and Rerank models. The Cohere Command model generates citations that provide the sources for the information it presents and offers strong text-generation capabilities. However, legal professionals often require specific answers found within their clients’ contracts, communications, and other documents, rather than just general knowledge about a legal case.
The DraftWise platform incorporates Cohere Embed, a multimodal embedding model that goes beyond simple keyword searches by enabling advanced search through these documents using semantic meaning. Cohere Rerank then ensures that the most relevant results are displayed prominently. These three models work in concert to provide accurate information to support complex legal cases with verifiable citations, enabling users to easily confirm material in source documents. Cohere Embed’s ability to process all data types, including images, diagrams, tables, and graphs, further enhances the DraftWise solutions, eliminating limitations imposed by text-only searches.
“We’ve built our models for real-world business use cases,” says Nicolás Morales, Head of Customer Experience and Partnerships at Cohere. “Cohere’s secure, enterprise-focused generative and retrieval AI models seamlessly integrate into your workflows, delivering powerful results with broad multilingual support, high accuracy with citations, and cost-efficiency.” This seamless integration and robust feature set make Cohere’s models an ideal choice for DraftWise’s legal AI platform.
“Azure AI Foundry Models is an absolute game-changer. It’s ignited development for us, improving developer efficiency by 60% over traditional methods,” adds Ding. “In the early days, we were trying out various model providers to see which one offered the best out-of-the-box performance. Had we chosen a single model provider with a proprietary SDK, we wouldn’t have the flexibility we’re now getting from the Microsoft single SDK that powers everything.” The unified SDK and extensive model selection offered by Azure AI Foundry Models provide DraftWise with unparalleled flexibility and agility.
Building with Trusted Microsoft Tools
The DraftWise development team also leveraged Azure AI Foundry Models to access the o-series reasoning models, which are used to augment search results returned by Cohere. To further enhance model performance, the team applies reinforcement fine-tuning, utilizing DraftWise’s proprietary data to tailor the results specifically to the legal profession.
Ding describes a typical interaction between the various models that underpin DraftWise solutions: a lawyer asks DraftWise to find an example of a termination clause in a licenseagreement. They may add a statement like, “Include all the extra features and make this friendly to the side I represent.” The Cohere model retrieves several examples. Then the fine-tuned o-series reasoning model responds to the lawyer’s request—“Tell me what I’m missing and generate the change for me”—to adjust the suggested draft. This collaborative interaction between the models ensures that the generated drafts are highly relevant and tailored to the specific needs of the user.
DraftWise internal benchmarks demonstrate a 30% improvement in search result quality since incorporating the fine-tuned Cohere models into their solution. Reinforcement fine-tuning has also yielded significant improvements in these results. “We have the models illustrate their reasoning before executing on the answer, but the thing that shines is the ability to sharpen the response with reinforcement fine-tuning,” adds Ding. This emphasis on reasoning and refinement ensures that the AI-powered solutions provide accurate and reliable results.
Empowering Legal Professionals
The threefold increase in application API calls made by DraftWise solutions to models over just the first quarter of 2025 indicates spectacular growth in usage. This surge in demand underscores the growing recognition of AI’s transformative potential within the legal industry.
“We’re seeing tremendous excitement about AI in the legal profession. In addition to the productivity boosts and faster new lawyer training our customers are experiencing, they’re advising their clients on how they can also use AI to improve their own operations,” says Seaton. The benefits of DraftWise’s solutions extend beyond individual lawyers, empowering entire firms to embrace AI and enhance their overall operations.
Ding and his team are deeply gratified by the positive impact that DraftWise tools have on legal professionals. “It’s incredible how capable our best users have become with DraftWise since we’ve introduced Azure AI Foundry Models into the product,” Ding concludes. “Several of our most elite users have been promoted to partner at their firms. The time they save on mundane tasks goes into value-added work that supercharges their performance. Building our solutions with the technology we trust is the key to dramatically impacting the industry.” By freeing lawyers from tedious tasks and empowering them to focus on higher-value activities, DraftWise is revolutionizing the legal profession and enabling legal professionals to reach new heights of success. The strategic partnership with Microsoft and the utilization of Azure AI Foundry Models have been instrumental in realizing this vision.