Lex blog reports today
Nicholas (Nik) Reed was two months out of Stanford Law School when he and classmate Daniel Lewis cofounded the legal research company Ravel Law. Becoming its COO, he helped drive its growth.
When LexisNexis acquired Ravel in 2017, he became vice president of product strategy, playing a lead role in integrating Ravel’s visualization and analytics tools into Lexis Advance.
Now, Reed is leaving Ravel to join another legal technology startup, the Axiom spin-off Knowable.
Reed joins Knowable as senior vice president of product and research and development, reporting directly to CEO Mark Harris, the Axiom cofounder who moved to Knowable when Axiom spun it off as a separate company last February.
(For more on Harris, listen to my recent LawNext interview with him.)
Knowable uses machine-learning technology and analytics to help companies better understand their contracts. Reed’s role will be to lead product development, research and design and to help the company accelerate its growth and expansion into new markets.
Last July, LexisNexis announced an investment in Knowable and a joint venture by which Knowable would continue to operate independently, but would be able to have access to LexisNexis’ brand, resources and infrastructure.
It was while LexisNexis was exploring the joint venture that Reed became intrigued about what Knowable was building, he told me during a recent phone call. Michael Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional, also saw synergy between Reed’s work and Knowable’s and introduced him to Harris. As Reed got to know the company, he saw major opportunity and a largely untapped market.
When he and Lewis founded Ravel, he explained, they had ambitious plans to cover all of law. But with limited resources to start out, they focused on litigation, building tools such as the judge analytics product he later helped integrate into Lexis Advance as Context, which analyzes the language of judges’ opinions to identity the cases and arguments they fine persuasive.
Read full article: https://www.lexblog.com/2019/12/03/ravel-cofounder-leaves-lexisnexis-joins-axiom-spin-off-knowable/
