Tom Dunlop, CEO & Founder at Summize is an achieved business and technology lawyer, Tom’s experience with reviewing contracts was the catalyst that led to Summize. Prior to this, he worked as a Global Legal Director for several fast-growth technology corporations.
Summize is transforming Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) by enabling entire businesses—not only legal teams—to work faster and smarter with contracts. The platform integrates directly into widely used tools like Microsoft Word, Teams, Slack, Outlook, and Gmail, meeting users where they already work. With an intuitive user experience, expert implementation, and powerful AI, Summize simplifies and accelerates the contract process from end to finish. Focused on driving business-wide CLM adoption, Summize is redefining how contracts are managed, reviewed, and executed across organizations.
What inspired you to create Summize? Were there specific challenges you faced as a General Counsel that led you to develop an AI-powered legal solution?
There’s a number of things that inspired me. Previously, as a Global Legal Director, I’d be there with my highlighter marker and printouts, reviewing contracts and attempting to create summaries of every one. There have been also teams of very demanding salespeople who needed attention and understandably desired to get deals done. There was clearly a necessity for automating tasks. I used to be working in a really high growth tech environment, so when it got here to innovation, I had an entrepreneurial mindset. Everyone around me was also continually looking out for higher ways of doing things, too. This stuff all coming together were the catalyst for me developing and starting Summize.
How has Summize evolved since its founding in 2018? What were some key milestones along the best way?
We were a generic summarization tool at first, so it was a giant step forward once we decided to concentrate on the legal industry, and specifically, in-house counsel. Next was once we reached our goal of making a holistic solution that might function a touchpoint for each contraction interaction – which also led to the widening of our functionality. The third milestone was once we began embedding our intelligence in other tools causing adoption to essentially take off. Then there was our expansion into the U.S. and the rapid growth that followed.
Along the best way we achieved quite a bit. We were first-to-market with Word Add-In and AI functionality. We were first-to-market with Teams and Slack chatbots that would interact with legal and create contracts. And, we’ll be first-to-market with additional capabilities within the very near future. We’re continually evolving.
What sets Summize other than other Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions available on the market?
Our unique selling point is our embedded approach versus an all-in-one CLM platform. Fundamentally, those are the choices, and we feel an embedded experience through existing and familiar tools is more powerful and facilitates adoption. Our use of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) can be a differentiator. Its ability to streamline processes and reduce manual effort is driving recent levels of cost efficiency for legal teams.
What industries or legal functions are currently leading in AI adoption, and which of them are lagging behind?
In-house counsel at technology and software corporations usually tend to adopt AI because of the high volume of deals and concentrate on efficiency. Whenever you’re in additional commercially focused environments, removing blockers to hurry deal processes is essential. We’re seeing adoption across all legal functions. Nonetheless, because the voice of a business, general in-house teams can actually be a barrier to AI. They should approve solutions and that may slow adoption amongst users and across wider business functions. But larger business teams which might be very deal focused know there’s immediate productivity gains and savings, in order that they’re adopting AI faster.
How do you see AI transforming legal work beyond contract evaluation? What other legal tasks could AI streamline?
Contracts are the system of record for any business transaction, delivering all of the relevant relationship data, starting from who you’re contracting with to specific obligations to termination details. Accessing that information and making it usable is what we’re doing with things like contract evaluation and summarization. Put AI on the back of that and you may drive data pushes between systems and workflow orchestration across various parts of the business. That opens the door to a world of applications. It would sound far-fetched, but AI could even transform the legal service model itself in the future, enabling firms to charge based on the knowledge they deliver and never time.
Based on Summize’s recent survey, 89% of in-house legal professionals use AI tools, yet concerns remain around privacy and security (45%), limited understanding or training (37%), and a scarcity of clear use cases (31%). How can legal teams move beyond initial AI adoption to make sure they’re using it securely and effectively as a trusted partner of their workflows?
They need to know how AI works, what to look out for from a security standpoint, and the way data interacts with an AI model. You might have to make sure they’re using it securely and effectively as a trusted partner in workflows. This requires training and clear AI policies. Team members must also understand how AI will impact the role of general counsel over the subsequent five years. Once they’ve this data, they’ll have the ability to use what they’ve learned to develop even greater use cases and spur further adoption,
How do you think that AI-powered tools like Summize will change the role of General Counsels and in-house legal teams over the subsequent five years?
I believe it’ll free them from lower value, high volume tasks, allowing them to concentrate on the best style of work. It’s going to also enable General Counsels to scale their knowledge, in addition to their experiences, across legal teams and the business itself. And along with being relieved of time-consuming, manual tasks, leaders will know that such jobs are being done to their standards.
Do you think that regulatory frameworks must evolve to higher govern using AI in legal tech?
Regulatory frameworks might want to specify the information utilized by language models (LLMs). What’s more, models could possibly be required to make use of verified content, which might shift the main target from data volume to quality and relevance. Overall, I do think we’ll see regulatory frameworks evolve, and models do higher at understanding the information it uses before rendering a solution.
What role do integrations (e.g., with Microsoft Word, Teams, Slack) play in making AI-driven legal tools more accessible and user-friendly?
Moving forward, it’ll be critical to have AI embedded in user workflows and experiences. The query is, how do you do it and make it easy for users? Integrations with Word, Teams and Slack are fundamentally necessary because individuals are already using and adopting those tools every day, making it the best access point to begin a question.
Integrations with on a regular basis tools will ensure AI-driven legal tools are more accessible and user-friendly.
What’s next for Summize? Are there any upcoming features or expansions we ought to be looking forward to?
We just launched our next-gen AI-Powered CLM with intelligent agents to speed up reviews and unlock contract insights that uses agenetic AI to handle tasks from redlining to review. We also broadened our chatbot’s functionality to interact with varied data sets. These are only a pair things we have now planned and we’re looking forward to introducing other powerful CLM developments.
