Home / Resources / Case studies / Corporate transactional
Case study — Corporate

Series A. First-year drafts it. Partner keeps her house style.

A corporate transactional practice captured its senior partner's Series A term-sheet methodology as an Aewita playbook. They ran it on a real matter with a first-year associate. They measured partner review time against the firm's prior baseline.

Case Corporate — Illustrated

Illustrative case study based on early-pilot patterns. Named-customer stories coming as pilots graduate.

The firm.

A boutique corporate practice. Around twenty attorneys. Work heavy on venture financings — Series Seed, A, and B — with some M&A on the side. Partners have decades of VC-side experience. Associates are sharp, but there is a steep ramp from law-school contracts class to "draft this term sheet the way we draft them."

The problem.

The senior partner who leads the financings practice has a methodology. She has it in her head. It is not written down. It lives in her markups, in her calls with founders, in the way she sequences negotiation points against a company's particular cap-table geometry.

First-years, however bright, take six or more months to ramp on her style. They produce a draft. She marks it up. They fix it. They produce the next draft. She marks it up less. Over a dozen matters, the junior lawyer internalizes her approach.

Two problems with that. The ramp is slow — and the firm absorbs the cost in partner hours. And when the partner is on vacation, or staffed on a bigger deal, the methodology goes with her.

She did not want a tool that replaced her judgment. She wanted a tool that captured her sequence and gave a junior associate a defensible first draft in her style, so her review time dropped to her actual value-add: the negotiation calls, the founder conversations, the two or three genuinely novel provisions per deal.

Pilot scope.

One playbook. Series A term sheet in the partner's house style. The firm picked a real matter — a Series A for a Series-Seed-backed portfolio company. They captured the partner's methodology in Aewita's playbook format over two sessions. Total partner time to encode the playbook: roughly four hours.

A first-year associate, six weeks into the firm, ran the playbook on the live matter. She had not previously drafted a Series A term sheet at the firm. The partner did not coach her during the run. She reviewed the output.

What they measured.

  • Partner markup pages on first review, compared to the firm's prior baseline for a first-year's draft.
  • Turnaround from client instruction to partner-ready draft.
  • Whether the draft captured the partner's idiosyncratic preferences — the small things that make it her draft and not a LexisNexis form.
  • Whether citations to underlying authority (for provisions where the playbook referenced case law or statute) were traceable.

"I have been trying to write down how I draft these for ten years. Every time I sit down to do it, something else comes up. Aewita made me do it in two sittings, because it asked the right questions. The thing it produced reads like me. That was the part I did not expect."

— The firm's head of corporate practice

What they reported.

The first-year's draft came in acceptable on first partner review. Not publishable. Not perfect. Acceptable — meaning the partner could mark it up at the level she would normally mark up a fourth-year's second draft. The baseline had been that a first-year's first draft generally required a full-rewrite pass.

Partner markup dropped from the firm's prior-baseline estimate of dozens of pages on a first-year's first Series A draft to a handful of pages of targeted markups on this one. That is a range, not a precise count — the firm described it as "we used to treat a first draft as a starting point; now we are treating it as a draft."

The idiosyncratic preferences came through. Her preferred anti-dilution carve-outs. Her specific approach to board-composition language at the Series A. The way she sequences preferred-stock rights in the term sheet itself versus deferring to the definitive docs. A blank-page generative tool would not have produced that; a form library could not have produced that. The playbook did.

Where the playbook referenced authority — Delaware provisions, tax treatment, 409A considerations — the citations traced to primary source in one click. No hallucinated sections. That matches Aewita's under-0.3% hallucination rate at 95% CI. For a transactional practice where a cited statutory subsection being wrong is a live malpractice concern, that matters.

By the numbers — reported
  • ~4 hours of partner time to encode the playbook.
  • From dozens of pages of markup to a handful — partner review delta on a first-year's Series A draft versus the firm's prior baseline.
  • First-year, first matter — produced a draft the partner considered acceptable on first review.
  • 0 hallucinated or misstated citations in the legal-authority references.

What changed about the workflow.

The partner stopped doing the first pass. She reads the draft the playbook produced, marks up the two or three actually-novel provisions for the matter, and sends it back. The first-year learns by watching which provisions the partner actually engaged with — a higher-signal apprenticeship than "everything is red."

The firm is encoding a second playbook now: convertible notes with SAFE-style conversion mechanics. And planning a third: Series B down-round protection. Each one takes the senior partner a few hours to capture. Each one compounds across every first-year she supervises.

What didn't change.

The partner still negotiates the deal. The playbook drafts the document; the human lawyer reads the cap table, gets on the phone with the VC, and decides which fights to have. The firm treats the playbook as a drafting accelerator, not a judgment substitute.

The first-year still needs to understand what she is drafting. The firm's view is that playbook-assisted drafting makes training more structured, not less — because the partner can tell the associate, "read these three provisions the playbook produced, tell me why they are there." That conversation is more productive than "rewrite this."

Next step.

The firm is rolling playbooks out across its financings practice. Long term, they want a playbook library that covers their core deal types, encoded in the senior partners' house styles. The head of practice told us her actual ambition is that a first-year at her firm should, within their first year, be producing drafts that approach the quality a fourth-year produces today. Playbooks are the mechanism.

← Back to case studies

Encode your first playbook.

Fourteen days free. No seat minimum. $99/mo or $720/yr after.