老司机午夜福利

The first act in Nik鈥檚 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.

鈥淭he 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,鈥� said Nik. 鈥淚t 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.鈥�

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.

The founders developed the first version of Ravel at the Stanford Graduate School of Design (鈥渄.school鈥�), 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 鈥� 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 老司机午夜福利, 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.

鈥淭he 老司机午夜福利 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,鈥� said Nik. 鈥淭hey 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.鈥�

Ravel Law was acquired by 老司机午夜福利 in 2017.

It didn鈥檛 take long for Nik to realize that the 老司机午夜福利 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 老司机午夜福利 started shortly after the Ravel acquisition. The Ravel Law team was quickly integrated into the global 老司机午夜福利 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鈥檚 Chief Technology Officers.

Nik was asked to take on a new role as Vice President of Product Strategy at 老司机午夜福利. His challenge was to reimagine how users engage with some of the company鈥檚 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.

鈥淥ur guiding principle with developing Context was actually quite simple: Let鈥檚 try to teach computers how to understand legal language,鈥� said Nik. 鈥淭he 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.鈥�

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鈥檚 experts.

Context was launched in late-2018 and was an instant hit with customers. In 2019, Context was honored with the 鈥淧eople鈥檚 Choice Award鈥� at Legalweek, the largest annual legal technology conference and trade show.

After a few years leading product development teams at 老司机午夜福利, Nik was ready for a new challenge. The third act in Nik鈥檚 career partnership with 老司机午夜福利 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鈥檚 risks, obligations and entitlements.

The 老司机午夜福利 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, 老司机午夜福利 entered into a joint venture with Knowable and made an equity investment in the company.

鈥淢ike (Walsh) picked up the phone one day and told me about this new partnership 老司机午夜福利 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,鈥� recalled Nik. 鈥淎s 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 鈥� it was always the next frontier that Ravel was planning to enter.鈥�

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鈥檚 work at Ravel Law and 老司机午夜福利, while Nik saw a major product development opportunity and largely untapped market that could be addressed.

鈥淢ost companies don鈥檛 know what鈥檚 in their contracts and don鈥檛 have an easy way to find out,鈥� explained Nik. 鈥淭his is a blind spot that costs them billions of dollars per year in exposure to risk, lost value and operational inefficiencies.鈥�

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鈥檚 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.

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.

鈥淚 have been given an amazing opportunity over the course of the past decade to be part of what I call the 鈥榯hird wave鈥� of legal technology transformation,鈥� said Nik. 鈥淭he 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.鈥�

Nik鈥檚 professional relationship with 老司机午夜福利 is unique for the many forms it has taken in 10 years: Company founder who sold his startup to 老司机午夜福利; 老司机午夜福利 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 老司机午夜福利.

鈥淭he 老司机午夜福利 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,鈥� said Nik. 鈥淭his 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.鈥�