How Draftwise Uses Cohere to Improve Legal Contract Search Quality by 30%
Draftwise, an AI-powered contract drafting and negotiation platform, built its Smart Draft product on Cohere’s Command, Embed, and Rerank models to enable semantic search and AI-generated contract language grounded in clients’ own document libraries. The system delivered a 30% improvement in search result quality and tripled API usage within a single quarter.
Impact
30%
Improvement in search result quality
3x
Increase in API call volume
Challenge
Legal professionals spent the majority of their time on repetitive contract drafting and manual search through past agreements, limiting their capacity for strategic client work and making it difficult to consistently surface the most relevant precedents quickly.
Solution
Draftwise built Smart Draft using a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline powered by Cohere Command for text generation, Cohere Embed for semantic search across document libraries, and Cohere Rerank for relevance ranking, deployed through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Cohere boosted search quality by 30%, giving lawyers the right proprietary data at their fingertips.”
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Full Story
Draftwise was founded on a specific observation about the legal profession: while lawyers describe the most rewarding part of their work as creative strategy and client counsel, they spend most of their time on routine contract drafting and document review. James Ding, Co-Founder and CEO of Draftwise, describes attorneys at client organizations as “cut-and-paste drones” — manually locating relevant clauses, adapting past agreements, and managing the friction of repetitive work before they can engage with the substantive parts of their role.
Building a platform to solve this required more than a search box. Legal documents carry high-stakes implications; accuracy, citation, and data security are non-negotiable. When Draftwise designed Smart Draft, its AI-powered contract drafting product, the team needed a retrieval system capable of surfacing semantically relevant content from clients’ proprietary document libraries — not just keyword matches — and a generation layer that could produce contract language with proper source attribution.
Draftwise evaluated large language models available on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, where the team’s existing relationship with Microsoft pointed them toward Cohere’s model suite. They selected three models: Command for text generation with source citations, Embed for multimodal semantic search across documents including images and tables, and Rerank to ensure the most relevant results surfaced at the top of every query. Together these three models form the RAG pipeline behind Smart Draft, grounding every generated clause in verified source material from the client’s own agreements.
The results were concrete: Draftwise’s internal benchmarks showed a 30% improvement in search result quality after adopting Cohere’s models. On the backend, API call volume tripled in just the first quarter of 2025 — a direct signal of growing adoption and usage intensity among legal teams.
Draftwise’s Chief Customer Officer noted that excitement about AI within the legal profession has reached genuine momentum, with clients now also asking how they can apply AI to their own operations beyond contract drafting. The company’s deployment shows a pattern emerging in professional services: when AI is grounded in proprietary data with proper citations and security controls, it shifts from a productivity tool to a quality multiplier for skilled practitioners.
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