From a Mishmash of Capabilities to Power Tools for Deal Lawyers

For many years, when people asked us about Syntheia’s positioning in the market, and we had always struggled to find a crisp answer. We were intentionally nimble and flexible as a company, tackling everything from machine learning-based data labeling to text extraction, semantic search, document compilation, and textual analysis. All of this was themed around building capabilities that would help transactional lawyers excel at their jobs.

Over time, we had assembled a disparate set of tools, reflecting the reality that transactional lawyers must undertake numerous discrete tasks to see a deal through from start to finish. Because our team comprised of predominantly builders, the challenge wasn't just creating these capabilities, but explaining how these capabilities fit into a coherent story.

In September 2025, we refreshed our brand and our website to tell our coherent story.

Our Philosophy: Build Useful Tools

We envisioned ourselves offering lawyers something like a garage filled with specialized tools that they could pull off the shelf when needed, then put away when done. We didn't want to be the platform where people had to stay logged in. Lawyers already had Outlook and Word where they perform the bulk of their work.

This philosophy guided our development for years, but it created a messaging challenge, especially as generative AI became the dominant conversation in legal tech. During the last couple of years, people kept asking about our generative AI strategy. Our answer was consistent: generative AI is another tool on the shelf. Generative AI should feature as a component within our set of tools, and only where it adds value.

For a long time, “building tools” was a confusing position for the market. The market wanted a clean, crisp answer: "We're an intelligence platform that does X" or "We're a closing platform that does Y." Syntheia was a bit of everything, all connected together, to solve 15 painful problems along the deal execution path.

Our core capability was to disassemble documents down to their building blocks - like Lego bricks - with which we could create both the raw data and the tools that made use of that data. This data platform + transactional tools pitch was a complex concept to explain, and we had always struggled to give a shorthand explanation of what Syntheia does.

Building Tools for Humans and AI

Recently, this positioning has become easier to explain, thanks to the evolution of generative AI and its foreseeable trajectory. Generative AI, at least in its current form, “thinks” very similarly to human beings - probabilistic and fuzzy. Our brains, like neural networks, are wired to trigger causal sequences of neurons that fire off and produce actions. This realization gave us a new metaphor and strategy: Rather than building a thin layer on top of generative AI, we build tools that both human beings and artificial intelligence can use effectively.

We are the tools that sit on your garage wall, ready for either human or AI hands to pick up and use.

This approach gave us tremendous flexibility in how we work with law firms and customers. The legal market is highly fragmented, with everyone at different points in their technology adoption journey. A top-tier law firm runs different technology than a mid-tier firm, which differs from a small team or an in-house legal department. There are only a few common denominators:

• some form of word processing tool (Microsoft Word or Google Docs), and

• an email inbox (Outlook or Gmail).

Beyond that, technology stacks diverge significantly.

We decided to reduce everything down to fundamentals: every lawyer works with text. Text is our universal building block. Then, what do we build on top of the text data?

Products Born out of Complaints

Each of our tool emerged from close relationships with law firms.

When a firm said, "Wouldn't it be great if we could turn your clause bank into something searchable inside Word?" we created the Smart Drafter - our very first product.

When a firm asked, “Can we see all the similar clauses in all the similar documents?” we quickly created the Super Comparer.

Once we had universal building blocks, we could move them around, collect them, and sort them. This led to a revelation: many of the players in the market talked about having the data, but the tools needed to manipulate and analyze that data didn't exist.

When generative AI emerged, most companies stopped building nuanced text manipulation and analysis tools. They threw everything into GenAI and hoped for sensible outputs. This created a gap in the marketplace where we were perfectly positioned. We sat between companies diving deep into document decomposition and text analysis, and the rise of GenAI that made many feel they no longer needed rigorous analytical exercises.

This positioning allowed us to focus on maximizing gains from reliable, deterministic systems that didn't risk hallucinations or errors from generative technologies. We decided go deep into what deterministic systems could accomplish.

“Power Tools for Deal Lawyers”

Today, when people ask what Syntheia creates and what we do, here's our clear answer: We make power tools that help transactional lawyers working on deals.

Power tools for the modern deal lawyer, designed to work seamlessly alongside both human expertise and artificial intelligence.