Henchman App

Henchman, a legal-tech company founded in Ghent, Belgium, in 2020, provides an AI-powered contract drafting and negotiation platform for legal professionals. The company was established by Jorn Vanysacker, Gilles Mattelin, and Wouter Van Respaille, who started developing the solution during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their collective background includes prior startup experience; Vanysacker and Mattelin were part of the HR-tech company Intuo, which was acquired by Unit4, an experience that shaped their approach to building Henchman.

The business operates on a SaaS model, targeting law firms and corporate legal departments. Its core function is to intelligently surface previously written clauses and definitions from a legal team's existing document management system (DMS), such as iManage, SharePoint, and Google Drive. This is delivered through a plug-in that integrates directly into Microsoft Word and Outlook, allowing lawyers to access institutional knowledge without leaving their familiar workflow. By connecting to a firm's contract database, Henchman automatically classifies and extracts clauses and definitions, creating a searchable repository that aims to accelerate the drafting process.

The platform's features are designed to streamline contract creation. Users can search for specific clauses using keywords or find similar examples by selecting existing text. Henchman also offers AI-driven functionalities, such as translating text, making grammatical adaptations, and providing suggestions for new contract language through a multi-LLM approach. The system ensures data privacy by hosting all information on its own servers and not using customer data for training AI models. Since its launch in June 2021, the company has seen significant traction, reporting 750% revenue growth and acquiring over 100 customers in 15 countries within its first couple of years.

Henchman has secured $10.4 million in total funding over four rounds, including a Series A round of approximately $7 million in March 2023, co-led by Adjacent VC and Acton Capital. This capital was aimed at furthering product innovation and expanding into new markets. In a significant milestone, Henchman was acquired by LexisNexis on June 17, 2024, positioning it to become a more dominant player in the legal technology landscape.

Keywords: legal tech, contract drafting, AI for lawyers, contract negotiation, clause management, legal SaaS, document automation, Microsoft Word add-in, legal knowledge management, DMS integration, contract analysis, corporate legal departments, law firm technology, intelligent document processing, clause library, legal workflow automation, LexisNexis, Gilles Mattelin, Jorn Vanysacker, Wouter Van Respaille