The Dropbox legal teams handles any contract Dropbox is a party to, from procurement and vendor paper to customer, partner, marketing, and real estate deals. About ten people, a mix of attorneys, contract managers, and legal ops, work through more than 200 contracts in a typical month, with stretches that push toward 300 or 400.

An expert in everything 

The hard part of in-house legal work isn’t just the volume of agreements, but the range they cover. The team handles standard software licenses and SaaS deals, creative and marketing agreements, content and talent deals, and the occasional contract nobody has touched before. Each one carries its own risk and its own issues to watch for. In a law firm there's backup. A partner down the hall, a knowledge management system, someone who has run this exact deal a dozen times. In-house, you're often the only person who has ever seen it.

"We have a pretty solid template repository, but it's hard to search and we don't have a template for everything." — Jason LeBlanc, Dropbox

Previously, the team brought in outside firms to cover judgement calls outside of their team’s expertise.. Lawyers searched for precedents, dug through memory for a similar deal, or messaged the group to ask if anyone had language to borrow. The work got done, but it was slow and it came out a little different every time.

Most of the team trained at law firms, where the instinct is to keep tight control of the work, and the legal AI they'd seen before had a habit of missing obvious issues and flagging things that weren't there. That meant there was a very high bar for selecting an AI tool to support the team’s contracting efforts. 

The contracts nobody has a template for 

Jason LeBlanc, a senior commercial counsel who manages part of the team, does the work that lives at the edges. Music licensing that nobody else at Dropbox has experience with. A transition services clause the team needs maybe once. The kind of agreement where there's no template to start from and no colleague who has done it before. He used to handle those by searching, hunting for a precedent, or asking the team and getting something close but never quite right. Now he hands the brief to Spellbook and gets tailored language back, with the reasoning for why it's drafted that way, then takes it from there.

The clearest case was a sponsorship contract for an AI symposium Dropbox was hosting. The team had solid templates for sponsoring other people's events, where Dropbox writes the check. They had nothing for the reverse, where Dropbox takes the money and runs the event. A colleague Jason asked couldn't even follow what he was after. He gave Spellbook the existing template, explained that he needed it flipped, and it rebuilt the contract from the other side. It also raised provisions he hadn't considered, like terms for leads exchanged at the event.

"Spellbook was able to understand what I was asking and then do exactly that and reverse the contract. And it also proposed a bunch of new language for various provisions that I hadn't thought of." — Jason LeBlanc, Dropbox

That depth is why Jason reaches for a specialized tool over a general one. Spellbook is trained on contracts, including Dropbox's own library, so the language it gives back reflects how the team already works rather than a generic guess.

"Asking a generalized AI technology like a regular old ChatGPT to produce a legal clause for a contract, or asking it for a legal opinion, is very different than a tool like Spellbook that's specifically trained on contracts, including our own contracts. You can't replicate that with a generalized AI tool." — Jason LeBlanc, Dropbox

The deals that used to need outside counsel 

For John Walker, who runs Dropbox's global commercial legal team, the value showed up on a deal he couldn't have handled alone. An expedited agreement came in for an executive, in an industry he'd never worked in, that needed to close in a day. Usually, outside counsel would be brought in, but the tight timeline made that a challenge. John ran it through Spellbook instead, complete with issues he needed to negotiate, and closed it on the deadline, confident he'd covered the right points.

"Instead of me having to go to outside counsel, I literally put it through Spellbook and got the industry insights that I needed to negotiate that deal very, very quickly." — John Walker, Dropbox

It's become a pattern. Work that used to mean a call to an outside firm now mostly stays in-house.

Standards the whole team can use 

When Cassidy Storer joined as legal operations manager, the team had no playbooks in place. The standard positions lived in people's heads and in template documents that were hard to search. Her job is to keep a small team from becoming the thing every deal waits on. She started turning those positions into Playbooks so every review meets the same standard, beginning with NDAs.

"I tried to make the NDA playbook one of the first days I got into the system, and I just uploaded our form and it made it within minutes." — Cassidy Storer, Dropbox

Building those standards used to be a much bigger job. John points out that refining a template and turning it into a working playbook was once a two-quarter effort, one quarter for the template and another to put it into practice. The team is now doing it across its whole set of agreement types at once.

"We're talking probably eight, nine, ten templates that we're going to be able to do in the time that it took to do one." — John Walker, Dropbox

Because the playbooks are built on Dropbox's own documents, the team trusts what comes back. It's reviewing third-party paper against their positions, not a generic standard.

Value from day one

Cassie had Spellbook driving value within days of starting, with limited training to get there. Routine third-party paper and NDAs go through it first, so the team clears more contracts. 

"We'll just be able to get through more contracts and make sure that legal really isn't a bottleneck." — Cassidy Storer, Dropbox

For the lawyers, the grunt work shrinks. A first read of a meaty contract that used to take about an hour now starts from a summary of what to watch for, and the table formatting that took 15 to 20 minutes takes seconds. That time goes back into the parts of the job that need a lawyer, getting into deals earlier and thinking harder about risk.

"The substantive legal work that we do is able to be run through Spellbook to make our lives not only easier and more efficient, but actually make us better lawyers." — John Walker, Dropbox

What's next for Dropbox 

The team is building playbooks across its full set of agreement types and rolling Spellbook out more broadly, using AI to take the routine work off the team so the lawyers can spend their time where it counts.

"Dropbox has taken a view that AI is an enabler, and it is a tool that we can use to more quickly and efficiently handle projects so that we can focus on some of those more strategic tasks and strategic initiatives." — John Walker, Dropbox

The small team at Dropbox is now more capable of handling the full range of contracts the company needs. The expertise they used to buy from a firm or borrow from a colleague, they now keep in-house.

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