Nik Reed is the SVP of Technology at Knowable with a long, storied career that took a few twists and turns after earning his law degree from Stanford Law School. Nik concedes that he couldn’t have predicted where he is today. However, his decision to forgo the traditional corporate route of private practice and enter legal tech has created a fortuitous path. He dubs this path the third wave of legal technology transformation.
Admittedly, this article can’t accurately quantify the impact Nik continues to have on the industry or the ins and outs of his journey. However, we may attempt to sum it up in three acts:
- Act One: A founder story
- Act Two: A melding of the minds
- Act Three: A new ad(venture)
Act One: A founder story
As the co-founder of Ravel Law, a venture he started in partnership with his law school classmate, Daniel Lewis, the two created a legal search, analytics, and visualization platform that would sift through millions of legal documents in seconds to surface insights. In just five years, Ravel Law was acquired by LexisNexis, which saw Nik and Daniel’s platform as the perfect complement to a suite of user-friendly tools that paired the best machine learning with customers’ needs.
Act Two: A melding of the minds
After Ravel’s acquisition, Nik stepped in as LexisNexis’ VP of Product Strategy, where he transformed Ravel into a new product called Context. Using machine learning to analyze millions of court documents, Context helps lawyers draft winning briefs or argue motions based on the language the judge cites most. Context won a People’s Choice Award at Legal Week in 2019.
Act Three: A new ad(venture)
Then came Nik’s next opportunity at Knowable, where he became SVP of Product Design & R&D for a new product focused on surfacing insights from executed agreements. So, when LexisNexis CEO Mike Walsh had the idea to partner with Knowable after its spin-off from Axiom, he called Nik.
And by this time, Nik was ready for his next wave. That wave included developing a contract intelligence platform that provides enterprises with a faster, easier way to quickly see, sort, and filter all executed contracts in their contract portfolios. His experience developing proprietary algorithms that expertly analyze legal documents would serve as the backbone for building a robust platform that helps General Counsels and LegalOps teams better understand what they’ve agreed to in their executed agreements so they can make better business decisions regarding risk, revenue/cost management and policy optimization.
So what’s his fourth act? We just have to wait and see.
In the meantime, you can do three things:
- Read LexisNexis’ full “three act” profile of Nik Reed with insights from CEO Mike Walsh and reflections from Nik on his journey.
- Get Nik’s perspective on the “Third-Wave of Legal Transformation: Part I and Part II.
- Glimpse the Knowable platform in this video narrated by Nik Reed himself using M&A as one specific use case (among many).
Interested in Knowable?