Washington

The problem

Remote teams sign contracts, NDAs, vendor agreements and contractor terms every week. Most of these documents follow familiar patterns, yet companies still wait days for a lawyer to review them or, worse, sign without reading closely. For a distributed team spread across time zones, a single stuck agreement can delay a hire, a launch or a partnership. Legal review had become a bottleneck that nobody owned and everybody worked around.

Why now

Legal work has always been hard to automate because it depends on context, judgment and precise language. Recent advances in language models changed that, making it possible to read a contract the way an experienced associate would, spotting unusual clauses and comparing them against a company’s own standards. At the same time, remote work multiplied the number of agreements a typical company signs, from contractor terms to international vendor contracts. Legal teams did not grow at the same pace. That widening gap between agreement volume and review capacity created an urgent, budgeted problem that buyers were actively trying to solve.

The founders

Dana Whitfield spent eight years as a commercial litigator, much of it untangling disputes that started with a clause nobody had noticed. Omar Haddad built search and ranking infrastructure at a large consumer company, where he learned how to make retrieval fast and trustworthy at scale. They met through a mutual friend who had been burned by an unreviewed vendor contract, and they started prototyping together that same month.

Why we invested

Malik backed Washington because the founders treated legal review as a workflow problem rather than a chatbot demo. Their product didn’t try to replace lawyers; it handled the predictable first pass, flagged the clauses that genuinely needed a human, and kept an audit trail of every decision. Even before the round, early customers were renewing without being asked and inviting their outside counsel into the product. For a seed-stage company, that kind of organic pull is rare, and it told us the founders had found a real pain point.

How we helped

We helped Dana and Omar build their first go-to-market motion, introducing them to heads of operations at a dozen remote-first companies in our network. Malik worked with them on pricing, steering them away from per-seat licensing toward a model tied to agreement volume. Our team also connected them with two law firms that now refer clients to Washington for routine reviews, turning a potential competitor into a distribution channel.

Where they are now

Washington now reviews thousands of agreements every month for distributed companies across North America and Europe. It has become the default first pass before outside counsel gets involved, cutting review times from days to minutes for standard documents. The company recently launched a negotiation assistant that suggests fallback language based on what similar companies have accepted. Dana still reads a sample of flagged clauses every week to make sure the product’s judgment stays sharp.