Raising Cane’s positions, encoded
Playbooks carry the team’s positions, fallback language and negotiation preferences, and guide each review.
Partnership announcement
Raising Cane’s turns 30 years of real estate expertise into an AI-powered capability for its next era of growth
Raising Cane’s is working with DraftPilot to reduce outside counsel spend as the business enters its next era of growth.
30 yearsof real estate and lease expertise behind every restaurant
1,600+restaurants planned in the United States
Top 10U.S. restaurant brand ambition by the end of the decade
The work behind every restaurant
Every new restaurant begins long before opening day.
As it prepares for its next phase of growth, Raising Cane’s is turning decades of real estate and lease experience into a capability its teams can use every day, helping them move faster, work more consistently and keep more knowledge inside the business.
Raising Cane’s celebrated its 30th birthday this year and has outlined a goal of operating more than 1,600 restaurants in the United States and becoming a top 10 U.S. restaurant brand by the end of the decade.
Sites, leases and approvals all take detailed work. As Raising Cane’s grows its restaurant footprint globally, the real estate team manages agreements that support existing locations and future opportunities, from lease renewals and amendments to letters of intent, SNDAs and third-party documents.
The work extends well beyond redlining. Teams need to compare drafts, understand concessions made in previous negotiations, produce summaries and quickly find answers across a large portfolio of agreements.
Historically, outside law firms handled much of the drafting, redlining and comparison work. But Raising Cane’s saw an opportunity to work differently. The team already had deep knowledge of its portfolio, preferred positions and negotiation history.
By making that knowledge easier to apply to each new document, they could prepare stronger first-pass reviews internally, work more consistently across the portfolio and ultimately reduce their reliance on outside counsel.
Bringing the first pass closer to the business
The team’s own positions, applied from the first review.
In a short space of time, the team encoded DraftPilot with its standard positions, acceptable deviations and fallback language, giving reviewers a faster and more consistent starting point across the portfolio.
With DraftPilot, the Raising Cane’s team can put its own experience and preferred positions to work from the very first review.
Instead of starting each review from scratch, the team can quickly see where incoming language aligns with Raising Cane’s preferred position, where it deviates and where closer attention is needed. That helps surface issues earlier and makes the knowledge developed across previous negotiations available to the people working on the next one.
Purpose-built legal AI, not another general assistant
More than a general-purpose assistant.
The Raising Cane’s team needed capabilities that sit inside legal work, applied to Raising Cane’s own standards, rather than a tool that treats every contract the same way.
Ask the agreements directly
AI chat lets the team ask questions of their agreements and quickly surface the provisions that matter.
No change to the workflow
These capabilities sit in Microsoft Word, inside the team’s existing drafting and negotiation workflow.
A capability the team can own
Lease experience becomes a system the company owns.
There is so much institutional knowledge in historical leases and prior markups that DraftPilot can operationalize it for future use.
The longer-term opportunity is to turn Raising Cane’s accumulated lease experience into a reusable system the company owns, helping the team compare new paper with approved precedent and carry learning into the next negotiation.
The goal is to standardize review quality across renewals, existing-portfolio work and future new-restaurant negotiations. Over time, completing more drafting, redlining, summaries and comparisons internally will reduce legal costs and reserve outside counsel for higher-risk issues.
Quote from DraftPilot
“What’s exciting about the Raising Cane’s approach is that the team isn’t simply looking to AI to make individual tasks faster. They’re thinking about how the knowledge built up across years of deals can become a capability the whole team can draw on. As Raising Cane’s enters its next phase of growth, we’re proud to help the Raising Cane’s team make that expertise easier to access, apply and carry forward into every negotiation.”
“We are delighted to be supporting Raising Cane’s on their growth journey and looking forward to their first UK restaurant opening next year.”
Media and partnership enquiries
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Media, partnership and customer reference enquiries are handled by the DraftPilot team. To see how the review workflow is measured in practice, start with the Axiom case study.
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