Ropes & Gray is Founding Legal Ontology Partner of Ontonomi™

Ropes & Gray is the founding partner of Ontonomi, a new offering from Draftwise, which will allow the firm to deploy its legal ontology within the private funds practice.

Ontonomi gives a standalone identity to the legal ontology platform Draftwise announced in August. This technology extends beyond Draftwise’s core drafting, review, and precedent research workflows to encompass broader areas across the business and practice of law.

Ontonomi launches a new category of technology for law firms, creating proprietary data assets that reflect their unique expertise. Law firms have an information advantage built through deep client relationships, market experience, and decades of legal work. Ontonomi turns that experience into sovereign intelligence that firms own and control, giving them autonomy over how their knowledge powers lawyers and AI, and a proprietary foundation for better decisions and enhanced client service.

Ropes & Gray has selected Draftwise’s Ontonomi as a platform to build a legal ontology to support its industry-leading private funds practice, ranked Band 1 by Chambers USA. Ontonomi will structure and connect the experience embedded in the firm’s fund formation work, including partnership agreements, side letters, MFN provisions, and other negotiated rights across fund and investor relationships. Lawyers will have immediate insights into precedent agreements and be able to assess current negotiation dynamics on a real-time basis by leveraging the firm’s collective experience as mapped by the ontology.

“Our goal is to strengthen our client service offering and expand our market insights through technology,” said Ropes & Gray partner Melissa Bender, 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 in order to give our clients that extra edge during negotiation.”

The private funds deployment is the first application of a broader partnership, with Ontonomi and Ropes & Gray extending its legal ontology into additional areas of the firm’s practice. The data modeled into an ontology for private funds lawyers is also useful for fund finance teams structuring subscription facilities, tax and ERISA lawyers analyzing investor obligations, and compliance teams tracking commitments.

“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, while maintaining the standards our clients expect from Ropes & Gray.”

“Ropes & Gray has built decades of experience through its lawyers, client relationships, and work,” said James Ding, founder and CEO of Draftwise. “AI is available to every firm, but that experience is uniquely theirs. Ontonomi gives Ropes & Gray a way to scale that proprietary intelligence across the whole firm.”