Legal software company Filevine announced on 14 January 2026 that it had acquired Pincites, a startup whose AI tool drafts and redlines contracts directly inside Microsoft Word. Filevine said the purchase itself was completed in December 2025.
The price was not disclosed. Filevine chief executive Ryan Anderson told Legaltech News, as reported by Legal.io, that the deal was paid in a mix of cash and equity. According to Filevine, Pincites picked it during a competitive process in which it also received bids from several legal AI unicorns.
The whole Pincites team, four people led by co-founders and sisters Sona and Mariam Sulakian, joined Filevine. The product becomes LOIS for Word, part of Filevine's Legal Operating Intelligence System, and the founders will lead Filevine's wider AI drafting work from a new San Francisco office.
What Pincites built
Pincites was founded in 2023 and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch. Its Word add-in lets legal teams turn their standard terms and guidance into negotiation playbooks, then uses large language models to take a first pass at incoming contracts, flag clauses that differ from the company's standard language and suggest edits.
Filevine said the tool reviews and rewrites clauses using a customer's standards, playbooks and market benchmarks, and learns from each edit. Its customers included legal teams at Redis, Glean and Vercel. Sanjana Parikh, legal counsel at Vercel, said in the announcement that Pincites helped her team handle customer agreements at scale.
Sona Sulakian previously worked as a transactional and patent attorney and as a legal tech consultant, according to her Y Combinator profile. Mariam Sulakian, the chief technology officer, previously worked in product at GitHub and in engineering at Meta.
“After meeting Filevine’s leadership team and seeing the strength of their technology and customer base, we knew there was no close second.”
Why Filevine is buying
Filevine, based in Salt Lake City, sells case and matter management software built around its LOIS AI system. Anderson said Filevine came to know Pincites as an early customer and expanded its contract quickly because his team used the product every day.
Legal.io reported that Filevine had built drafting tools of its own but concluded that buying Pincites would bring a more mature Word-based product faster than building one. Filevine plans to use the technology for litigation drafting, so that lawyers can write and revise briefs in Word while staying connected to their case data, and to keep investing in contract redlining for transactional lawyers.
Filevine said its LegalAI corporate business grew 120% in 2025 and that corporate clients such as Kroger, Goodwill, the Utah Jazz and Garmin use it for claims, depositions, risk and in-house legal work. It said those customers needed a tool for reviewing large volumes of contracts.
The founders and the funding
Pincites announced a $3 million seed round in 2023, a few months after its Y Combinator batch. VCBacked lists General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman among its investors.
Sona Sulakian said the founders saw no close second to Filevine after meeting its leadership and seeing its technology and customer base.
Filevine keeps buying
Pincites is Filevine's second acquisition in less than a year. In May 2025 it bought Parrot, a virtual deposition and AI medical records chronology platform, which became Depositions by Filevine and MedChron.
The deals follow a $400 million all-equity raise that Filevine announced in 2025. Legal.io reported that the money came in two rounds that closed in mid-2024 and late 2025, and that Anderson said acquisitions remain part of the company's longer-term growth plan.
Filevine said the two acquisitions together support its aim of an end-to-end platform for litigators, covering each stage of a case, while Pincites also gives it a product for in-house and transactional contract review. The bids that Filevine said Pincites received from several legal AI unicorns suggest that larger rivals were also looking for drafting tools that work inside Word.
