A contract tool built around your firm's history, not a generic standard.
August was founded in 2025 in Washington DC. We started because we kept watching associates reconcile AI output with firm precedent by hand, clause by clause, deal after deal.
Mission
Institutional knowledge should be active, not archival.
Every deal your firm closes adds to a body of hard-won knowledge about how your partners negotiate, what positions you take, and where you draw lines. That knowledge lives in your document management system, technically accessible but practically buried. August makes it queryable at the moment an associate needs it: while drafting, while reviewing, while onboarding a new matter.
The gap we are filling is not speed. It is precision. Reviewing a contract against your own precedent bank is not just faster than doing it manually, it is more accurate than reviewing against a model trained on someone else's deals. That is what we are building toward.
The team
Three people who have worked this problem from different angles.
Rutvik Rau
CEO & Co-Founder
Rutvik spent five years as a transactional associate at a DC mid-market firm before moving to legal technology. He has worked on M&A, private equity financings, and commercial agreements across a range of industries. August is his attempt to build the tool he wished existed during those years.
Maya Thornton
Head of Product
Maya led product at two earlier legal tech companies focused on document management and workflow. She joined August to build something closer to where actual drafting happens, rather than managing files after the fact. She drives the workbench design and attorney-facing experience.
James Okafor
Head of Engineering
James comes from applied ML research with a focus on information retrieval and document understanding. He has worked on large-scale text indexing systems and on retrieval-augmented generation before that phrase was common. He leads August's technical architecture and the precedent bank pipeline.
Where we started
Washington DC, 2025. A spreadsheet full of redlines that should have been automated.
August started as a side project during Rutvik's last year in practice. He kept a spreadsheet of clauses where his firm had a clear, well-documented position, and he kept watching himself and his colleagues hunt for that precedent manually each time it came up. The manual search was not because the answers were not there. They were in the deal files. The problem was that you could not query those files the way you needed to at 11pm during a closing.
Maya and James joined in early 2025. The product direction came out of conversations with practicing transactional attorneys who had tried general-purpose AI tools and found them useful for the wrong thing: generating plausible text, not grounding drafts in what this firm actually does. That distinction drives every build decision we make.
We are still early. We are working closely with a small group of design partners to make sure the core workflow is right before we scale. If you are a transactional practice that wants to shape that, we want to hear from you.
Interested in working with us?
We are adding design partners through the end of 2026. If your firm does transactional work and wants a contract tool built around your own precedent, reach out.