Draftwise has launched Ontonomi, a legal ontology platform designed to turn law firms’ accumulated work product and institutional knowledge into structured data that lawyers and AI systems can use across matters, with Ropes & Gray joining as its founding legal ontology partner.
Ropes & Gray will initially deploy Ontonomi within its private funds practice, using the platform to structure and connect information contained across fund formation work, including partnership agreements, side letters, most-favored-nation provisions and other negotiated rights involving funds and investors.
The deployment addresses a growing challenge for large law firms adopting generative AI: models may be broadly available across the industry, but much of a firm’s competitive knowledge remains dispersed across documents, matters and individual lawyers. Ontonomi is intended to create a structured representation of that experience while keeping the resulting data under the firm’s control.
Draftwise first announced the underlying legal ontology technology in August. Ontonomi gives that technology a standalone identity beyond Draftwise’s existing drafting, document review and precedent research products.
Rather than functioning primarily as another generative AI interface, the platform models relationships among clients, matters, transactions, negotiated positions and outcomes. That structure is designed to let lawyers query institutional experience and understand how contractual terms and negotiating positions relate to previous work.
For Ropes & Gray’s private funds lawyers, the initial implementation is intended to provide faster access to precedent agreements and a more current view of negotiation patterns across the firm’s collective fund formation experience. “Our goal is to strengthen our client service offering and expand our market insights through technology,” said Melissa Bender, a Ropes & Gray partner who leads the private funds strategic innovation team. “By building with Ontonomi, we’ve been able to harness our tremendous depth of experience and the accumulated knowledge from decades of funds work and to make that intelligence immediately accessible.”
The private funds deployment is expected to be the first stage of a broader partnership between Draftwise and Ropes & Gray. The companies plan to extend the ontology into additional areas of the firm.
The same relationships modeled for fund formation can have applications elsewhere. Fund finance lawyers, for example, may need information about investor commitments when structuring subscription facilities, while tax and ERISA lawyers can use related information when evaluating investor obligations. Compliance teams may also need to track commitments across funds and investors.
That ability to connect information across practice areas is central to Draftwise’s positioning of Ontonomi. Instead of treating individual contracts and matters as isolated documents, the platform creates relationships among the underlying legal concepts and data, potentially making institutional knowledge easier to reuse across different workflows.
“Our approach to AI is client-focused: we adopt technology when it improves the quality, consistency, and efficiency of the work we deliver to clients,” said Neill Jakobe, vice chair of Ropes & Gray. “Ontonomi gives our lawyers another powerful way to apply the firm’s collective experience and judgment at scale.”
Draftwise founder and CEO James Ding said the platform is designed around the premise that law firms’ proprietary experience can become increasingly valuable as access to general-purpose AI becomes widespread.
“AI is available to every firm, but that experience is uniquely theirs,” Ding said. “Ontonomi gives Ropes & Gray a way to scale that proprietary intelligence across the whole firm.”
Data governance will be particularly important for ontology-based systems operating across confidential legal matters. Draftwise said Ontonomi mirrors a law firm’s existing document-management permissions and enforces ethical walls on every query. The platform is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliant and is designed to meet GDPR requirements.
Ropes & Gray has more than 1,500 lawyers and legal professionals across offices in the United States, Europe and Asia. Its practices span asset management, private equity, M&A, finance, tax, life sciences, healthcare, intellectual property, litigation, cybersecurity and other areas.
The Ontonomi partnership gives Draftwise a large-law-firm deployment for technology that moves beyond AI-assisted drafting toward organizing the underlying relationships within a firm’s proprietary legal data. For Ropes & Gray, the first test will be whether that structured knowledge can make decades of private funds experience more immediately usable during active negotiations and eventually across related practices.