The first time I spoke with David Stewart, he asked me something no one had asked before: “How does your API handle reconciliation of multiple conflicting edits?”
David is the CTO of Blackletter, a new kind of law firm built from first principles around client needs and frontier technology. Blackletter launched this summer with fixed prices, no billable hours, and elite lawyers, and has since grown rapidly.
Before we spoke, David had already created test API keys via our self-serve developer portal and spiked integration of our infrastructure for comparing legal documents. His testing had confirmed the table stakes: that our deterministic comparison engine met the high standards of his lawyers.
He had spent the previous month paying for the incumbent’s redlining product while his team waited for licenses that never arrived. His API request there had gone unanswered for six weeks.
Now, on our call, he wanted to drill into how our infrastructure could support his multi-agent workflows.
As David grilled us on the finer points of document comparison and versioning, I felt pure excitement.
When we joined Y Combinator in January 2021, our tagline was “git for lawyers.” In the long march that followed — the years we worked on designing our algorithms and building out support for the tens of thousands of edge cases our engine needed to handle for lawyers to trust our comparisons — our north star was the conviction that one day software engineers like David would find their way into the legal profession.
We built Version Story in the belief that technology would inevitably transform the legal profession. Now that AI has catalyzed that shift, we’re thrilled to be able to support the builders and visionaries who are reshaping the industry.
Onboarding new customers feels like handing over the keys to a beautiful house we spent years building. Do you do PDF to DOCX comparison? Yup. What about creating a history of changes across multiple versions? Yes, also that. And so on.
Since our last call with David, Blackletter has scaled to running thousands of comparisons via our API each day. When we told him over Slack that we’d pushed an update bringing comparison latency to under one second, he replied with a thumbs-up emoji. We’re planning to hop on another call with David when we’ve rolled out our upcoming DOCX editing APIs for him to test.
