Customer Stories
The research that used to take a hundred tabs now takes one
LEGAL RESEARCH, EMPLOYMENT COMPLIANCE, CONTRACT REDLINING, AND SCALING IN-HOUSE
For most of his time on Sequoia’s legal team, Shunkou Kinoshita ran research the way most in-house lawyers do. A question came in from the business, maybe about leave laws in a state nobody on the team had dealt with before, and the work started with a search engine.
A dozen results came back, then two dozen, most of them saying roughly the same thing, a few contradicting each other, none of them telling him which one to trust without reading through all of them first. Somewhere in that process, a straightforward question turned into an afternoon.
At Sequoia, the questions kept multiplying faster than the searches got any easier. Sales agreements, NDAs, vendor agreements, partnership agreements: more of each every year, spread across employment, privacy, IP, and commercial work, reviewed by a legal team of seven that wasn’t growing at the pace the business was.
The team didn’t need more legal expertise. It needed the hour of assembly that sits underneath every question to stop eating the day. That hour used to mean a browser full of open tabs. After Ruli, it means one search that comes back with the answer already sourced.
A redlining problem that turned into something bigger
Sequoia went looking for Ruli to solve a redlining problem. Agreement volume was climbing, and the team evaluated a redlining-specific tool alongside full-suite platforms, including a CLM with built-in redlining. Ruli won partly on breadth: redlining, an assistant, contract analysis, and monitoring were already built and working.
The size of the company mattered too. Shunkou has said plainly that Ruli being smaller at the time was part of the appeal, not a risk to manage around. The team ran its own two-to-three-week evaluation before signing, with several legal team members testing different parts of the product independently.
The structure that makes research usable
What the team actually reaches for most, a year in, isn’t the redlining that brought them in the door. It’s the research layer underneath everything else.
The employment side of Sequoia’s legal work is where the gap between a search engine and an actual answer shows up most. State, county, and even city-level rules vary enough that no one on a seven-person team can hold all of it in memory, and a generic search returns volume, not judgment.
When Sequoia’s employment counsel needed to check the company handbook against the regulations that applied to it, she ran the review through Ruli rather than assembling it search by search. The review came back faster, with the underlying sources attached so the team could verify anything that mattered before relying on it.
That pattern holds across the team. Ruli doesn’t just return an answer. It returns the framework and citations behind it, so a lawyer can check the sourcing before it goes anywhere near a business decision.
What changes when redlining becomes measurable
Sequoia’s legal team built a target directly into this year’s goals: 75% of the contracts the team reviews will run through Ruli’s redlining. The push came from the general counsel and chief legal officer, who asked whether Ruli could support a goal like that before the team committed to it. The answer was yes, as long as the playbooks were in place first.
Getting the playbooks built turned out to be less a technical hurdle than a scheduling one. Shunkou describes the process as closer to a couple of minutes per playbook than a project. Sequoia’s NDA lead had hers built and running well before the rest of the team, adding only a handful of rules specific to Sequoia’s language on top of what Ruli offered out of the box.
Time savings the team can point to
Once the playbooks were live, the time saved became measurable. Shunkou estimates the average agreement saves the team around 20 minutes, and more on procurement and enterprise sales contracts that don’t follow Sequoia’s standard forms.
The team’s goal for contracts reviewed through Ruli redlining this fiscal year.
Estimated time saved on an average agreement, with larger gains on non-standard contracts.
Supporting growing contract and research volume across employment, privacy, IP, and commercial work.
Monitoring turned into a similar surprise. It wasn’t part of the original pitch that brought Sequoia to Ruli, but Shunkou now runs monitor reports as a regular part of his routine, something he didn’t expect to rely on when the team signed.
The gains compound across a team reviewing agreements every week: less time assembling first-pass research, faster playbook-driven redlines, and more room for the legal judgment that actually requires a lawyer.
A product that moves with the feedback
Shunkou points to the pace of updates as much as any single feature. A scheduling change he’d asked about for Ruli’s monitoring tool showed up on the next monthly call, built the way he’d described it. He also credits direct access to Ruli’s leadership for making the relationship feel proportionate to the size of Sequoia’s team rather than an afterthought.
Looking ahead, he sees two directions Ruli could take next: a full CLM that folds redlining, the assistant, and contract analysis into one system, or autonomous agents that handle the lowest-risk, highest-volume work without a lawyer in the loop, with NDA redlining as the clearest candidate.
Whichever direction Ruli takes, the team is still building toward its 75% goal, still tuning playbooks, and still finding uses for the product it didn’t expect when it signed a year ago looking for a redlining tool.
See how Ruli helps in-house legal teams replace browser-tab research with concise, sourced answers.
Customer Stories
