Half lawyers, half engineers. Entirely on your side.

Precedent Labs started in two rooms above a sandwich shop on Fetter Lane in the spring of 2017. Eleanor Whitcombe had spent eleven years in the M&A group at Freshfields, the last four as a partner, and had lost count of the tools that were bought for her team and quietly abandoned. Tomasz Nowak had spent the same decade building data systems at Palantir and Thomson Reuters, and had watched lawyers work around software rather than with it.

The observation they shared was simple. Legal software was designed for a hypothetical lawyer and then sold to real ones. The real ones had an iManage workspace with fifteen years of folder conventions, a redlining habit that lived in Word, and a partner who would not sign off on anything she could not check herself. The tools ignored all of that, and so the tools were ignored.

The first project was a diligence tracker for a corporate team of nine. It was not ambitious. It sat inside the firm's existing iManage workspace, matched the way the team already named their folders, and saved each associate roughly a day a week. The firm is still a client. So is the tracker, now in its sixth version.

Nine years on, we are sixty people across London, New York and Toronto: engineers, product designers, and former practising lawyers who sit on every project team. The method has not changed. Shadow the team before writing code. Build inside the tools they already use. Cite everything. Ship every week. Stay.