New platform turns a law firm’s institutional knowledge into a connected intelligence layer for understanding client history, deals, relationships, rights, and obligations
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESS Newswire / August 24, 2026 / Draftwise, the proprietary intelligence platform for law, today announced the launch of Legal Ontology by Draftwise, the first legal ontology platform to reach the market. The platform gives law firms a new way to work with the knowledge embedded across their legal data, connecting the clients, agreements, clauses, rights, obligations, and negotiated positions that make up a firm’s unique experience.
Unlike search, which retrieves relevant language from individual documents, Legal Ontology captures the relationships between the things those documents describe. Firms can use that connected view to analyze their counterparties, deals, negotiated positions, rights, and obligations across their entire practice; compare their experience across clients and transactions; and understand how a change in one place could affect relationships and obligations elsewhere.
The platform can surface insights that would otherwise require lawyers to piece together information across years of agreements, side letters, amendments, and other records. In a fund practice, for example, a firm can identify which LPs hold a particular right, trace how it was negotiated and amended, compare that position with the firm’s experience across other LPs, and determine whether extending it to another LP could create obligations elsewhere. In finance, the same technology can connect provisions across facilities and surface the potential impact of a change in one agreement.
Legal Ontology turns the experience a firm has accumulated through thousands of deals into an ownable asset that can be used across the practice. Instead of relying on documents, disconnected systems, or individual lawyers’ memories to reconstruct what the firm knows, firms can put that knowledge to work in new matters and decisions.
That creates a new kind of proprietary advantage at a time when the underlying AI is increasingly becoming a commodity. Every firm can access the same foundation models. What cannot be replicated is the firm’s own history: the positions it has negotiated, the concessions it has made, the counterparties it knows, the risks it has accepted, and the language its clients trust. Legal Ontology structures that knowledge within the firm’s own environment. It does not use a firm’s data to train a tool that may also have been sold to another firm.
Draftwise’s ontology technology was developed specifically for legal work and builds on its founders’ experience designing and deploying ontologies at scale. Before founding Draftwise, the team built more than 200 ontology workflows for Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and large law firms. Draftwise is now working with multiple top 20 global law firms to extend ontology-powered intelligence beyond drafting and across their practices.
“Law firms are asking a bigger question about AI: how does it move beyond making individual tasks more efficient and actually transform the business?” said James Ding, founder and CEO of Draftwise. “The answer starts with what makes each firm unique: its proprietary knowledge, data, and relationships. Legal Ontology gives firms a way to structure and connect that intelligence so lawyers and AI can reason across it and use it to make better decisions. We believe Draftwise is the first to bring a legal ontology platform to market.”
Legal Ontology by Draftwise is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified and GDPR compliant. Ethical walls are enforced on every query, and access mirrors a firm’s existing document management permissions.
For more information or to request a demo, visit www.draftwise.com/ontology
About Draftwise
Draftwise is a proprietary intelligence platform that helps lawyers leverage their institutional knowledge to draft, review, and negotiate. By connecting, structuring, and delivering legal data at the moment of need, Draftwise enables every lawyer to build on the organization’s best thinking and hard-won experience in every matter.
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SOURCE: Draftwise
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