Vancouver founder Ryan Wilson isn’t a lawyer — and that’s the point. A multi-exited technology entrepreneur, Wilson built Walter after experiencing firsthand the inefficiencies of legal work.
“I always felt like I underpaid the law firm for their advice and expertise, but I overpaid for the work,” Wilson said in a video announcing the launch of Walter’s new AI Agent.
That frustration led him to create Walter, a platform that acts as a single source of truth for law firms and their clients. Instead of forcing lawyers to juggle cap tables in Carta, minute books scattered across iManage, DocuSign, and entity management software, and client data split between firms and corporate systems, Walter brings it all together.
“Walter is a collaboration tool between the law firm and their client to store all of the information that makes up the complete legal picture of that client’s records,” Wilson explained.
Now in use at some of the largest law firms in the world, Walter has expanded beyond record-keeping to AI. The company’s new AI Agent, launched this week, was designed to avoid the pitfalls of “sparkly demos” that fail in practice. “We didn’t want to be a thin layer on top of somebody else’s AI,” Wilson said. “What we wanted to be is a really thick layer of data and tools that are needed to make AI agents actually deliver on the promise of the transformation that is possible in the legal industry.”
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Unlike competing tools that convert Word files into Markdown, strip away formatting, and regenerate lossy versions of documents, Walter’s AI Agent works natively in Microsoft Word and Outlook — the daily workflow of lawyers. It can track changes, manage formatting, and even handle complex references. Just as importantly, it closes the loop: after completing document edits or pulling precedents from iManage, the agent can draft the reply email to the client, attachments included.
Wilson believes this approach makes Walter’s AI stand out. “Our initial feedback from law firms and users using this tool has been overwhelmingly positive. People simply say, this is the best AI agent I’ve ever used,” he said.
For Wilson, the goal isn’t to replace lawyers, but to empower them. By automating the tedious “first mile” of document preparation and the “last mile” of email replies, Walter’s AI Agent frees up time for lawyers to do what they do best: provide high-value expertise to clients.
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