Kutana+Brochet has expanded its legal desktop portfolio by acquiring a majority share in NLP document review and drafting startup Contract Genetica, in a significant acquisition by the UK document lifecycle vendor.
Contract Genetica, founded in 2019, is a SaaS solution within the Microsoft Word interface that proposes and completes clauses as you work, leveraging firms’ knowledge libraries and document management systems. It can suggest what is market and help to drive contract standardisation.
Kutana+Brochet develops user productivity tools in Microsoft 365 for legal and corporate clients, managing the document lifecycle from creation through to editing, storing, printing, signing and issuing documents. Kutana+Brochet’s director, Rob Simcock, told Legal IT Insider: “Contract Genetica is an AI drafting tool to help lawyers draft their contracts but also see their position on contracts: you can highlight a clause and it will tell you your own position on that to help you draft. It will be integrated into our products for house restyling so everything is in the right section.”
Asked why firms wouldn’t use the likes of Microsoft Copilot, Simcock said: “This is all about different ends of the market. Large law firms might be able to use Copilot but firms that don’t have £100k are still doing things manually. It’s really to help those firms and because this integrates with our other productivity tools. It’s fine to have lots of tools but often lawyers don’t use them. This is all in Word and together with our templates and house restyling tools it will fit in nicely.”
Contract Genetica was co-founded by brothers John and Andrew Danahy. John was a partner at King & Wood Mallesons at the time of founding the company and is now a partner at Bird & Bird. He resigned as a director of the business last year. Andrew Danahy runs the business alongside chief strategy officer Robert Lankester and the pair will continue to run and develop the business post-acquisition.
Lankester said: “Our products are the perfect fit for Kutana+Brochet’s Legal Desktop. With CG’s AI,
users will gain clause-level insights, enabling faster and more accurate drafting, review and negotiation. Co-founder Andrew Danahy and I are excited to see this acquisition bring our AI drafting tools to a wider market. We look forward to working with the Kutana+Brochet team to continue enhancing the integrated solution and expanding its reach.”