The Operating System for In-House Legal: Our Series A in Sandstone

Nick Fleisher had​​ a front-row seat to one of the quietest shifts in corporate America. As a lead of McKinsey’s legal technology practice, he spent years inside dozens of law firms and in-house legal teams, advising Fortune 100 companies on operations, data, AI, and talent. The pattern was hard to miss: companies were pulling more and more legal work in-house, and the lawyers they hired to do it were drowning in everything that wasn’t law.

He watched general counsels and legal ops leaders who were supposed to manage risk and shape strategy spend their days managing a shared inbox. Categorizing requests. Cross-referencing customer data in Salesforce. Hunting down transaction details, writing up a summary, routing it to the right person, then starting over.

His co-founder, Jarryd Strydom, knew the problem from the inside. He led legal ops transformations at McKinsey and was an in-house technology attorney before that, where his job was largely running that same shared inbox: categorizing requests, collecting context from Salesforce and procurement tools, assigning work, and rarely getting to the law itself. So Nick and Jarryd teamed up with Nick’s college roommate, co-founder Liam Germain, who was an engineering and design leader at cyber and mapping software companies, and left to build the company they kept wishing existed.

Around them, Nick, Jarryd, and Liam have assembled a rare combination: former Big Law lawyers, general counsel from leading companies, general counsels-turned-software engineers, heads of legal operations who have lived through months-long CLM rollouts, and engineers who built foundational infrastructure at places like Google and Microsoft.

Enter Sandstone

Sandstone is the operating system for in-house legal. It unifies intake, context, and execution. It embeds into email, Slack, Salesforce, and Jira, captures each request where it originates, and pulls the surrounding context automatically. From there, legal teams can stand up AI agents in under 10 minutes to handle intake, triage, first-pass redlining, and drafting, collapsing months of implementation into days.

We think in-house legal is one of the most underserved markets in software. Nearly one in five lawyers in the US now work inside a company rather than a firm, and in-house legal represents roughly $51B in annual spend. Yet the software serving it has stayed expensive, stagnant, and broken: legacy contract management systems built for an era when legal work moved slowly, and you could afford to spend months on an implementation.

Two shifts make now the moment in our opinion. First, the process work that eats most of a legal team’s day, the intake, triage, routing, and first-pass review, is finally automatable with AI. Second, AI can take the perfunctory first pass on documents so lawyers spend their judgment where it counts: helping the business move. Put those together, and the math on running an in-house legal team changes completely.

We think Sandstone is one of the defining vertical AI platforms: purpose-built for a profession, embedded in the way that profession operates, and defensible because of that depth. Most companies with more than 100 people have in-house legal counsel, and almost none of them have software worthy of the work.

The Early Signal

The early signal is loud. Sandstone has some accounts signing up the same day and is already in production at Wayfair, Mercury, and other enterprises with complex, high-stakes legal needs.

We led Sandstone’s $30M Series A because we believe Nick, Liam, Jarryd, and the team they’ve built are the ones to finally let lawyers do law. If that mission speaks to you, there’s a way in: Sandstone is hiring across engineering, go-to-market, and legal.

If you run an in-house team and you’re tired of watching your best lawyers live in a shared inbox, they want to hear from you. And if you just want to see where this goes, follow along; we think it’s going to be a big one.