Driving the “Third Wave” of Legal Tech Innovation

Nicholas Reed
Senior Vice President, Knowable

Nik Reed is Senior Vice President of Product and Development at Knowable, a contract management and analytics company that has a joint venture partnership with LexisNexis. Previously, he served as Vice President of Product Strategy at LexisNexis, where he led a team that reimagined the company’s legal research products and integrated machine learning technology into new tools, such as the award-winning Context case law analytics offering. Nik was the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ravel Law, a groundbreaking legal research and analytics company that was acquired by LexisNexis in 2017. He earned a law degree from Stanford Law School, a master of science degree in business administration from HEC Paris, and a bachelor of arts degree in political economy from Stanford University.

After graduating from Stanford Law School, Nik Reed set out on a career journey to bring innovative technologies — such as machine learning and data analytics — to the day-to-day practice of law. That journey intersected with the product development vision set by the executives at LexisNexis and led to a mutually rewarding relationship that has so far played out in three acts: Co-founder of a company that was sold to LexisNexis; Product development executive at LexisNexis who led an innovation team; and now Head of R&D at a startup that is a joint venture partner with LexisNexis.

Founding a Legal Tech Company

The first act in Nik’s career was the founding of a groundbreaking legal search and visualization company that he and his law school classmate, Daniel Lewis, dreamed up while in law school.

“The genesis for Ravel Law was Daniel being frustrated with the technology that we were being taught to use in law school and in firms, thinking about how legal research was really the foundation for the practice of law, and realizing that the major legal research providers seemed to rely on search platforms that were built with older technologies,” said Nik. “It was clear to us that a new generation of lawyers was going to require new search tools that were faster, easier to use and better able to help lawyers pinpoint what they need from an avalanche of information.”

Nik and Daniel set out to create an innovative legal search, analytics and visualization platform that would transform the way that lawyers conducted legal research. They founded Ravel Law in 2012.

“Our idea was to bring together the power of new forms of technology enabled by the cloud and reduced cost of things like machine learning, which we believed was ideally suited for the rigors of legal research, with the importance of elegant product design and data visualization, which is needed to reduce user friction and create a positive experience,” recalled Nik.

The founders developed the first version of Ravel at the Stanford Graduate School of Design (“d.school”), where they teamed up with Stanford engineering students to build a tool that could sift through millions of legal documents in seconds and identify insights. The product then displays the results of this research in a nifty data visualization that unearths relevant cases — all in a visual map that makes it much easier for a new generation of tech-savvy lawyers to view the data.

Soon after the rollout of Ravel, Nik and Daniel were approached by new investors and potential business partners. One of those interested parties was LexisNexis, which had recently doubled down on a vision to reimagine their entire lineup of legal research tools to align with the preferences of a new generation of users.

“The LexisNexis senior executive team brought a shared passion for legal analytics and user-centered product design, with artificial intelligence and other applications of machine learning at the heart of all new legal research products,” said Nik. “They also assured us that their interest in Ravel Law went beyond the product itself and extended to the talent we had assembled on our team, the startup mentality that we wanted to preserve, and the entrepreneurial vision we had for the industry. It was clear to Daniel and I that they were the right partner for us at the right time.”

Ravel Law was acquired by LexisNexis in 2017.

Leading an Innovation Team at LexisNexis

It didn’t take long for Nik to realize that the LexisNexis executive team was quite serious about their assurances; their interest in Ravel Law did indeed go beyond the acquisition of their flagship product.

The second act of his career journey in partnership with LexisNexis started shortly after the Ravel acquisition. The Ravel Law team was quickly integrated into the global LexisNexis organization and individual team members were soon asked to get involved in new product development projects. Former Ravel employees stepped into key roles as product engineers and one was eventually tapped as one of the company’s Chief Technology Officers.

“LexisNexis CEO Mike Walsh and his senior execs proved to be quick eyes for talent recognition and saw the value that our people could bring to various product development and engineering teams across the company,” said Nik. “The key to the success of the integration was that they ‘let us be us’ and protected our Silicon Valley culture while helping us navigate our way into a large global organization.”

Nik was asked to take on a new role as Vice President of Product Strategy at LexisNexis. His challenge was to reimagine how users engage with some of the company’s legal research products and lead an innovation effort to create new offerings that leverage the power of machine learning. The most prominent result of this work was the relaunch of Ravel as a breakthrough case law language analytics product called Context.

“Our guiding principle with developing Context was actually quite simple: Let’s try to teach computers how to understand legal language,” said Nik. “The idea was to use machine learning to analyze the language of individual judges to find arguments they find most persuasive, and to deploy the same technology to apply data analytics to the vetting of expert witnesses.”

Context analyzes tens of millions of court documents and extracts specific language that will resonate with a particular judge, including the language a judge cites most often and the rationale behind his or her rulings, to help lawyers draft winning briefs or successfully argue motions. The software also provides detailed analyses on expert witnesses, including specific reasons why their testimony was included or excluded, so attorneys can better select and defend their expert or impeach the opposition’s experts.

Context was launched in late-2018 and was an instant hit with customers. In 2019, Context was honored with the “People’s Choice Award” at Legalweek, the largest annual legal technology conference and trade show.

Driving R&D at Another Legal Tech Startup

After a few years leading product development teams at LexisNexis, Nik was ready for a new challenge. The third act in Nik’s career partnership with LexisNexis was ready to take flight.

Knowable is a contract data management and analytics startup that was spun out of Axiom in 2019, with the vision of building a platform for enterprise contracts intelligence. By converting arcane legal language into structured data, Knowable helps corporate clients find, search, organize and analyze their contracts. This gives executives fast visibility into their company’s risks, obligations and entitlements.

The LexisNexis executive team quickly identified the potential of the Knowable platform to revolutionize the way that companies manage their vast universe of business contracts. In July 2019, LexisNexis entered into a joint venture with Knowable and made an equity investment in the company.

“Mike (Walsh) picked up the phone one day and told me about this new partnership LexisNexis was considering with a spin-off of a business unit from Axiom, one of the first legal tech start-ups, which was in the process of going public,” recalled Nik. “As soon as he explained that Knowable was working on an exciting new technology platform that leverages machine learning technology and analytics to help corporate teams better manage their contracts, I was intrigued to learn more – it was always the next frontier that Ravel was planning to enter.”

Walsh opened the door for Nik to meet with the Knowable executive team and they hit it off right away. Knowable CEO Mark Harris immediately recognized the synergy between Nik’s work at Ravel Law and LexisNexis, while Nik saw a major product development opportunity and largely untapped market that could be addressed.

“Most companies don’t know what’s in their contracts and don’t have an easy way to find out,” explained Nik. “This is a blind spot that costs them billions of dollars per year in exposure to risk, lost value and operational inefficiencies.”

Nik is now heading up product design and R&D for Knowable, where he is putting to use all of his accumulated experience with machine learning technology and product design in an effort to build the industry’s first comprehensive executed contract analytics platform. The software converts dense legal prose into structured data that can be aggregated and analyzed from the high-level portfolio level down to the individual contract. His goal is to provide corporate counsel with the dashboard they rely upon to easily see, sort and filter all of the contracts in their database so they can make optimal business decisions based on those analytics.

“The core of what LexisNexis does is structure vast amounts of unstructured data, what Knowable is doing is structuring all of a company’s unstructured contracts,” said Nik. “There is complete alignment in those objectives, so there will certainly be opportunities that can accelerate both companies’ growth.”

A Look Back at the Journey

Nik concedes that he could have never foreseen the path that his career would take after graduating from law school. Rather than taking the expected route of going into private or corporate legal practice, or perhaps back to strategy consulting, his decision to start a tech company with the audacious ambition of changing the way lawyers conduct legal research was a gamble. That high risk has led to a high reward.

“I have been given an amazing opportunity over the course of the past decade to be part of what I call the ‘third wave’ of legal technology transformation,” said Nik. “The first wave was about changing how lawyers do what they do by optimizing workflow with things like document management tools. The second wave was about changing who was working in law with technologies that replaced some of the people doing legal work and rethinking the traditional law firm model. We are now in the third wave, which is fundamentally changing what lawyers do by applying natural language processing to significantly narrow the gap between human processing and computer processing.”

Nik’s professional relationship with LexisNexis is unique for the many forms it has taken in 10 years: Company founder who sold his startup to LexisNexis; LexisNexis executive who led a product development team that launched an award-winning new product; and Head of product design and R&D for a startup with a joint venture partnership with LexisNexis.

“The LexisNexis executive team has remained true to their word and has helped me carve out opportunities for creating tools that take advantage of AI-based technologies to transform how lawyers understand and interact with legal information,” said Nik. “This is the third wave of legal technology development and I believe it will fundamentally change what lawyers do. I am really excited to continue to be at the forefront of innovation in the space.”