A Company · About
Built for the people who work the paper.
Leela Works is a contract negotiation toolkit for transactional lawyers and in-house teams. One workspace that holds the deal, from first turn to signature: the drafts, the issues, the positions.
Why
Why we're building this
Every transactional lawyer knows the round-four problem. The return draft lands, and before anyone can respond, someone has to reconstruct the negotiation: what was conceded in round two, which positions are still live, where the operative language actually sits. That knowledge exists. It's in old emails, in a colleague's memory, in a redline saved under the wrong filename. The tools just don't hold it.
Most AI contract tools answer this problem with speed. More comments, faster. But a negotiation isn't a reading-comprehension exercise. It's a sequence of judgment calls that have to stay consistent across weeks of moving paper. So we built Leela to work the way a good associate works: it reads the whole document, applies your playbook, and keeps the record straight. Every decision stays with the lawyer.
Founders
Who's behind it
Leela Works was founded by Tripti Mody Sheth and Vivek Durai. Between them: 50 years inside legal teams and legal technology, one running legal functions inside multinational businesses, the other building software those teams depend on.
Tripti spent 15 years as a commercial lawyer, advising on transactions, governance, and regulatory work, and was COO of Legal Pundits earlier in her career. At Leela she leads company strategy and customer partnerships, and she is the source of the legal judgment encoded in Leela's playbooks: the positions, the fallbacks, the order in which an experienced lawyer concedes.
Away from the law, she paints and has written a children's book, Warriors of Kurukshetra.
Vivek is a corporate lawyer who stopped practicing and started building. Over two decades he has founded legal and corporate-data products used across the Indian market, including paper.vc and TermSheet. At Leela he leads product and AI architecture, working directly with legal teams so the system mirrors how a lawyer actually reasons through a negotiation.
His first attempt at the problem came in 2007: a proprietary machine-learning library for contract understanding, built while he was still practicing law.
What we believe
How we build
01
Lawyer-first
We build for the daily reality of transactional practice: the turn deadlines, the vendor paper, the partner who wants the issues list by morning. Not for a demo.
02
You stay in control
Leela drafts and proposes. The lawyer decides. Nothing changes the document without a sign-off.
03
Confidential by default
Your deals are treated the way you treat them: isolated per matter, protected, and never used to train models.
Talk to us
See it on your own paper.
A walkthrough takes thirty minutes.
- Founded 2026 · New York
- A US corporation, with founders based in India
- Humblepaper, Inc. · 169 Madison Ave STE 11274, New York, NY 10016