How Animaj manages Global IP

Building scalable legal workflows

As Animaj scales globally, its Legal team is reimagining how to support a scaling global creative business. Guided by London-based Asli Gozen, the team thrives in a culture where innovation, collaboration, and professional growth are closely aligned with Animaj’s business goals.Paris-based Louise Cagnon Boulc’h spearheads and drives the adoption of AI and automation across legal workflows, while Commercial Counsel Astrid Wauquiez strengthens legal capabilities across multiple markets. Together, they are the next-generation Legal function who streamline workflows leveraging AI and empower colleagues across departments.

“Animaj operates a self service system. We provide templates, training and legal clinics, and the business is empowered to complete key terms directly into agreements”, says Louise, This model reflects this team’s philosophy: empower teams whilst ensuring oversight and compliance. It means lawyers spend less time chasing details and more time providing high-value advice, “a shift that makes legal feel like a business partner, not a bottleneck”, says Asli.

How are you using Wordsmith across teams?

Wordsmith AI has been integrated into Slack, turning Legal from a standalone function into a real-time partner for all teams.

“We created an ‘Ask A Legal Ninja’ Slack channel”, says Louise. “This is connected to different Google Drive workspaces: production, distribution, trade marks, everything related to our IPs, including Maya the Bee and Pocoyo. Teams send their queries through Slack and Wordsmith provides instant answers about contracts, legal processes, signing authority rights availability and provides the source data.”

Asli says “Wordsmith has been a huge success across the wider business, reaching far beyond our usual partners in production, licensing and distribution. Our small team can even support colleagues in Finance and AI Engineering by extracting contract data on financial terms or AI use clauses in minutes. Our co-founder and CEO, Sixte de Vauplane, has praised us for ‘thinking like founders’ - as we’ve found a way to save hours of manual work across multiple teams.”"Wordsmith is amazing at contract review: for third-party templates, we run our playbooks to quickly highlight non-compliant clauses with automatic markup. For our own templates, it helps us draft revisions fast”, Louise explains, “The multi-language explanations are great for our global work, plus it covers French and German law which is super useful. We can translate documents, so we can review something like a German music composition agreement in seconds and advise the business immediately”. This capability strengthens collaboration and allows the team to support the business in real time across global markets.

What makes legal work in media and entertainment unique?

In media and entertainment, rights management is everything.

“Rights queries and IP checks are highly bespoke to our industry,”

That accuracy is critical for sales. “When the sales team goes to sell something, rights need to be cleared first. They can only know that if Wordsmith has reviewed the contract and confirmed whether FAST or AVOD rights, for example, have been sold exclusively or whether they’re still available to sell,” Louise explains.

Astrid adds, “Production can also check if music rights are cleared by reviewing agreements we’ve inherited from third-party IP acquisitions — it’s a complete game changer for due diligence.”

Asli believes AI-driven rights checks could set a new industry standard. With continued development, Wordsmith has the potential to replace legacy systems that lack AI-powered review. Animaj now relies on Wordsmith to track what's sold, what's available, and under what conditions - spanning everything from corporate acquisitions to production to sales. "Global IP underpins everything we do," Asli says "Wordsmith lets us manage that complexity directly."

What's been the biggest impact?

Louise highlights that reclaimed time from repetitive tasks is one of the biggest benefits of legal AI. “I would say I have gained 50 to 90 percent of my time back with Wordsmith’s contract review. Reviewing a 30-page third-party contract used to take an entire afternoon. With Wordsmith, the same review now takes around ten minutes.”

“Leading AI automation isn’t just about systems or technology,” Asli reflects. “It’s about creating the conditions for my team to succeed, learn, and innovate with confidence.” The impact goes beyond efficiency. With more capacity and headspace, the team is now deeply involved in strategy, planning, and business development — adding value and, often, directly contributing to revenue growth.

Powering growth through smarter legal

For a multi-platform media company operating across multiple market, managing a 360-degree business from production to distribution to licensing, Wordsmith enables a lean legal team to keep pace as the company scales.

At Animaj, legal innovation powers creativity, growth, and collaboration — showing how technology and leadership can transform a business.