Microsoft's Robin AI hires could hint at a bigger legal play inside Word

Microsoft has hired at least 18 former tech employees of struggling legal AI startup Robin AI, including senior leaders and AI specialists, in a move that points to a shift in how legal drafting capability may be developed inside Word.

The hires were first reported by Artificial Lawyer, with Bloomberg Law tallying at least 18 employee moves. These include Robin’s former chief technology officer Carina Negreanu, now a partner group manager at Microsoft Word, and former director of AI Diana Mincu, who has joined as a principal applied scientist manager.

Microsoft confirmed the hires but were thin on details. A Microsoft spokesperson told Non-Billable: "Microsoft has hired several employees from Robin AI. Microsoft has no plans to acquire Robin AI. We have nothing further to share."

Robin’s recent slide

Robin has had a turbulent time over the past year, including its search for a buyer after funding plans collapsed, subsequent job cuts and the sale of its managed services arm to Scissero.

The setbacks followed a period of heavy fundraising. Robin had raised around $69 million by late 2024, and was once positioned as a leading player in the legal AI race.

Against that backdrop, Microsoft’s move looks less like a conventional acqui-hire and more like a selective extraction of legal-specific engineering capability from a distressed business.

Why it matters

Robin’s focus on legal drafting and document workflows addressed areas where Word has historically fallen short for lawyers. Microsoft already has Copilot in Word, but it is largely a general-purpose writing assistant. Bringing Robin's engineering talent in-house suggests Microsoft is at least thinking about how far Word can move beyond general-purpose AI help towards something more tailored to legal work.

For law firms - which still rely religiously on Word - that could be a net positive. Native improvements to drafting and document logic would reduce friction and reliance on multiple overlapping tools layered on top of Office.

What about legal tech

For legal AI vendors, the implications are more nuanced. Many legal AI tools are built on Microsoft infrastructure and depend on deep integration with Word. If Microsoft improves the underlying platform, those vendors may benefit from a stronger foundation and more consistent APIs.

But vendors whose core proposition is simply compensating for Word’s historical limitations, particularly those without strong analytics or proprietary datasets, may find their differentiation threatened.

Basic clause libraries, drafting assistants and workflow add-ons that offer incremental gains could struggle if similar functionality becomes native to Word. Spellbook’s recent launch of Compare to Market reflects this type of differentiation, pushing beyond a Word add-in to benchmark contract terms against aggregated deal data rather than relying solely on AI-generated suggestions.

Robin AI declined to comment on the departures.