Ropes & Gray structures private-funds knowledge with Ontonomi

On September 30, 2026, Ropes & Gray announced that it would deploy Draftwise’s Ontonomi in its private-funds practice to connect partnership agreements, side letters, MFN provisions and negotiated investor rights. The firm describes the ontology as a controlled data asset that can expose precedent and negotiation patterns across related practices while remaining grounded in proprietary experience. Mid-sized firms are unlikely to replicate the same scale, but the design principle is directly transferable: identify one practice with repeated documents and decisions, then structure that knowledge before adding more AI. The second-order advantage is not model access but the ability to make the firm’s own history queryable and reusable.