Financial Times Picks Wordsmith for Legal AI

The Financial Times has selected Wordsmith AI as its enterprise legal platform to support its legal, compliance, and company secretarial function across six continents.

The deal marks a shift in how large in-house legal teams are approaching AI adoption. Rather than deploying separate tools for individual tasks, the FT opted for a single platform to manage the full scope of its legal operations. This signals a broader trend among global enterprises seeking unified legal infrastructure over fragmented point solutions.

The Core Problem

The FT's legal team supports nearly 3,000 employees across six continents. Its work spans commercial contracts, content rights, data privacy, and regulatory compliance, covering jurisdictions from London to Hong Kong.

Like most in-house legal teams, the FT's lawyers were handling a high volume of routine work. Contract reviews, vendor due diligence, and compliance queries consumed significant time, creating bottlenecks that slowed down the wider business.

The team needed a way to handle routine legal work at scale. It also needed a foundation to extend legal support to commercial, procurement, and other business teams that regularly require legal input.

Why Wordsmith Won

The FT ran a structured pilot before making its decision. During the evaluation, the team assessed whether Wordsmith could support not just one part of the function, but all three: legal, compliance, and company secretarial.

Company secretarial, often referred to as CoSec, covers governance and regulatory obligations such as board management, filings, and corporate records. It is a distinct function from general legal work, and the FT required a platform capable of handling all three areas together.

Wordsmith met that requirement. The platform's repository and agent functionality also offered a pathway for extending legal support into the wider business, giving non-legal teams access to tools for completing routine tasks with legal oversight built in.

Dan Guildford, General Counsel at the Financial Times, explained the decision: "We chose Wordsmith because it's not just a tool for the legal team, it's a platform that powers our entire legal, compliance, and company secretarial function, and gives us the foundation to connect legal to the rest of the business."

Platform Capabilities

Wordsmith will be deployed across the FT's legal, compliance, and CoSec teams. The platform supports contract review, contract drafting, multi-jurisdictional legal research across 130 or more jurisdictions, and compliance activities.

Its AI agent functionality enables end-to-end workflows. A single workflow can receive a request, draft a document, route it for approval, and send it, without requiring manual steps at each stage.

The platform also integrates with Microsoft Word, allowing lawyers to review, redline, draft, research, and translate documents without leaving the application. Additional integrations include Slack and Microsoft 365.

The repository feature creates a searchable foundation of the organisation's own documents, prior positions, and risk profile. This allows the platform to combine institutional knowledge with legal intelligence drawn from trusted external sources.

Extending Legal Access

One of the FT's stated goals is to bring legal support closer to the business. Teams in commercial and procurement often need legal input for tasks such as vendor due diligence and compliance queries. Currently, those requests flow through the legal team, adding to its workload.

Wordsmith's platform creates the infrastructure to allow those teams to complete routine tasks independently, using tools they already work with, while legal oversight remains in place.

Ross McNairn, CEO of Wordsmith AI, commented on the partnership: "Their legal team came to us with a clear view of what they needed. Not a tool to speed up one task, but a platform to change how legal works across the whole organisation. That's a harder problem to solve, and it's exactly the one Wordsmith is built for."

The deployment reflects a wider shift in legal technology. In-house teams are moving away from single-use tools toward platforms that can consolidate multiple legal functions under one system. The FT's decision to adopt Wordsmith across legal, compliance, and CoSec simultaneously represents one of the more comprehensive deployments reported in the in-house legal sector this year.

The platform's ability to support over 130 jurisdictions also addresses a specific operational need for the FT, whose legal obligations span multiple regions with different regulatory frameworks.

About Wordsmith AI

Wordsmith AI is an enterprise legal platform designed for in-house legal teams. Its core features include contract review and drafting, AI agents, multi-jurisdictional research, document repositories, and intake management. The platform integrates with Microsoft Word, Slack, and Microsoft 365. Wordsmith supports legal, compliance, and company secretarial functions and is built to extend legal workflows into wider business teams. The company is headquartered and operates as of 2026.