Evisort, a growing Legal technology company in Silicon Valley, has generated news recently at a dizzying pace. In their latest development, they have opened a new wing of their website, 'evisort.careers,' inviting potential applicants to "create amazing AI together." Open positions include engineers, managers, and designers, to name a few departments.
Small wonder that Evisort is hiring. The company has doubled, then doubled its staff again in the past year. Starting from their dorm rooms at Harvard and MIT, company founders Jerry Ting, Jake Sussman, and Amine Anoun launched their offices from Boston to Silicon Valley and have recently expanded to a new headquarters in San Mateo. Fueled by a healthy shot of investor funding to the tune of $4.5 million at the start of 2019, as reported in Forbes, Evisort is currently in a significant period of growth.
Here are just a few high-profile staff members who have had a day in the spotlight since joining Evisort's ranks:
- Legal tech veteran Alex Su has joined the company as Director of Business Development, as reported in Yahoo Finance. Su joins Evisort coming from Logikcull, an e-discovery automation company which he helped take from zero to ten million in revenue in just nineteen months.
- Silicon Valley tech industry veteran Francisco Meza has joined Evisort as Vice President of Engineering, as reported on the company's own news section. Meza comes to Evisort from Invitae and MuleSoft, with twenty years of experience building software and engineering teams.
- Riley Hawkins, a product manager at Evisort, tells the story of his journey from law student to working at a software company, on the company's own blog at Medium. He cites being at the nexus of business and engineering as being beneficial to his professional growth.
- Evisort executive vice president Memme Onwudiwe garnered an interview with Harvard Law Today, where he shares his story of transitioning from Harvard studies to an AI startup. Onwudiwe was also working on a journal for Kennedy School, for whom he arranged an interview with the president of Ghana, and talks about taking advantage of the opportunity for well-rounded career development.
In addition, Evisort founder Jerry Ting, together with his co-founders, each made Forbes' list of "30 under 30" for 2019, and has also appeared as a guest on the Technically Legal podcast.
Evisort is a company devoted to harnessing the power of new frontiers in deep-learning AI to mine data from legal documents. It has been called "Google for contracts," to sum it up in an elevator pitch. Evisort's system handles the document's entire processing cycle, from OCR scanning to parsing the document's text for key terms, names, conditions, and binding obligations. It stores this mined data in a database for later reports, or for integration with the cloud and the host of other apps more familiar to the legal world.
Reading legal documents and extracting key data points from the sea of legal boilerplate is a labor-intensive process, one that has previously taken many hours of staff time to complete. With Evisort's technology, a 30-page contract can be digitally digested in seconds. As co-founder Jake Sussman says in his own blog at Medium, a typical Fortune 500 company has to manage between 20K and 40K contracts at any given time. Inefficient handling of contracts is said to cost firms anywhere from 5% to 40% of their business value. Cutting out this overwhelming paper glut and allowing even small legal departments to manage their documents efficiently is going to be a huge boon that will leave an impression on the bottom line for any company that has legal obligations.
At Evisort, the growth may only be getting started. They have continued to add new clients starting form their first customer in mid-2018 to Fortune 500 corporations, Am Law 100 firms, startups, sports teams, telecom companies, and more. Whether in the healthcare of the media industry, just about any company could use a trusty robot reader. The market for Evisort may be near-infinite, given their phenomenal expansion already.
Beyond legal contracts and Evisort, general methods of AI semantic text processing might someday be applied outside the legal sphere. The medical field still has the need for a more comprehensive expert system that can scan in medical charts and suggest a diagnosis. There's also a short jump from legal language to political language in bills, laws, resolutions, executive orders, and statutes that constitute the paperwork of government. One Google deep learning algorithm recently plowed through mathematical theorems and produced several minor proofs that had been unforeseen, even though trivial.
We know we're seeing the start of something big, but as is typical for tech stories, we might not know how big for quite some time.