NEAR Foundation legal counsel cuts contract review time ~30% with Spellbook

Senior Legal Counsel Abhishek Vaidyanathan handles high-stakes business development and partnership contracts for the Switzerland-based NEAR Foundation in a fast-evolving blockchain field. Many agreements are long and intricate, with nuanced or one-sided clauses that are time-consuming to locate and evaluate. He also encounters unfamiliar jurisdictions and deal types (such as LP funding agreements) that require extra context before he can redraft terms to fit NEAR Foundation’s needs.

Abhishek uses Spellbook to draft, review, understand, and revise agreements—asking questions about specific clauses, running suggestions and negotiation reviews for an initial pass, then using draft to reshape one-sided language. On a complex 70-page partnership agreement, he used Spellbook’s negotiation function to surface issues and the draft function to rewrite key clauses before editing the output himself.

Spellbook delivers about a 30% (or higher) lift in his efficiency versus prior drafting and negotiation methods, with faster issue-spotting on large, multi-part agreements. On the 70-page partnership agreement that would have taken three to four hours to review, Spellbook saved at least an hour and 20 minutes by letting him focus on what mattered first, then do a full read-through. He describes the review quality as roughly what he’d expect from a new junior associate and plans to expand usage to junior lawyers on the team.

• • GenAI contract tools are most valuable when they accelerate first-pass issue-spotting and rewrite drafts so counsel can spend time on judgment, not hunting clauses.
• • Asking the tool for clause-level explanation and practical examples helps in-house counsel handle unfamiliar deal types and jurisdictions faster.
• • Measured time savings on a single large agreement (70 pages; ~1h20m saved) can substantiate broader efficiency claims like a ~30% lift.