337: Will AI automate legal work? The future of lawyers with Scott Stevenson, Spellbook CEO.

Scott Stevenson is the CEO and co-founder of Spellbook, a legal tech company transforming how attorneys review contracts with AI. Since launching in 2018, Spellbook’s AI copilot has been adopted by more than 1,700 legal teams and helps review over a million contracts annually. Scott recently led the company through a $20 million Series A backed by Inovia Capital, Thomson Reuters Ventures, The Legaltech Fund, and others. Before Spellbook, he founded Mune, a startup at the intersection of music and technology, and holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Scott Stevenson’s journey from building electronic instruments to launching Spellbook, the world’s first generative AI copilot for lawyers.
• Why contracts, not court cases, were the ideal entry point for legal AI and how Spellbook now helps 3,000+ legal teams review over a million contracts a year.
• How AI is expanding access to legal services by reducing costs and enabling lawyers to serve the 70% of clients who previously couldn’t afford help.
• Why AI won’t replace lawyers and how tools like Spellbook enhance human judgment rather than automate legal decisions.
• Why now may be the best time to enter the legal field as AI eliminates drudgery and creates more room for strategy and client work.
• What product-market fit really looks like and how Scott found it after testing more than 100 hypotheses before landing on a solution that clicked.
• Why the best AI products embrace controlled chaos over rigid structure and how leaning into complexity reflects how the real world actually works.

Resources:

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter
• Connect with Scott on LinkedIn
• AI fun fact article
• On How to Build an AI platform that's growing faster than OpenAI