Evisort, a rising star in Legal tech, has recently launched a careers website. With the invitation “let’s create amazing AI together,” the company invites candidates to join it in its mission to revolutionize how companies interact with their legal documents. The fact that Evisort has enjoyed attention from high profile investors makes this a promising career choice for the right candidates.
The process of managing documents has never had a more exciting send-off. In just a couple years, the CEO of Evisort, Jerry Ting, has managed to make Forbes’ list of “30 Under 30,” the company has attracted buzz across tech news media, and Forbes reports Evisort received a $4.5 million round of investor backing, from a venture capital firm backed by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bob Iger, and Bill Gates. Having posted tremendous growth in 2018, the company’s headcount has quadrupled in the past year.
Meanwhile, the company has recently added legal tech veteran Alex Su as head of business development, as reported in Yahoo Finance. The company’s own news section also reports that Silicon Valley tech industry veteran Francisco Meza has come on board as vice president of engineering. They join a cast of MIT and Harvard Law alumni, bringing together AI technology applied to the world of business law. Another staff member, executive vice president Memme Onwudiwe, granted an interview for Harvard Law Today in May ’19 to discuss his road to joining Evisort from Harvard.
Evisort’s innovation is to be the “Google for contracts,” as some tech journalists have put it. They use AI algorithms to help companies mine data from contracts, with a deep learning system that can parse meaning and context in legal language. This virtually eliminates the need to manually read contracts and related legal documents. For in-house company legal departments, financial professionals, and legal business departments, the Evisort system is a huge time-saver which eliminates the need for manual data entry.
The company’s ‘how it works’ section spotlights the process:
- Classify – The AI algorithm can sort documents by type.
- Extract – The AI mines provisions, names, dates, addresses, terms, and other information from documents.
- Track – The system keeps up on obligations, liabilities, and renewals, and also integrates with other document handling software.
- Report – The AI can generate compact mined reports on the contract and document data.
People outside of the legal field may not appreciate what an AI system “reading” contracts means. The average legal professional can be saddled with up to seventy legal documents per business day. Many of these will typically be thirty pages of boilerplate with just a few key names and figures changed. Previously, the cognitive burden of processing all this data fell to paralegals, clerks, data entry technicians, or simply a rushed legal staff if they didn’t have the manpower.
The innovation of AI reading any document comprehensively has implications far beyond the legal field. Many other fields, such as medicine and scientific research, could benefit from an automatic parsing engine that can crunch through reams of paperwork. As it is, Evisort’s legal paperwork processing has already earned it clients from industries as diverse as sports, media, healthcare, and telecoms.
Between Evisort and other related document processing software, investment in legal technology companies has grown by a hefty 700% in the past year, as reported in Forbes. Figuring that most companies big enough to have a payroll also have a legal department swamped in paperwork, Evisort and its ilk might become household names before long.
As CEO Jerry Ting blogs on the Evisort ‘careers’ site addition, “Working at an early stage startup has been unlike any other work experience we’ve had. It is a more personal journey, the bonds you build with colleagues are deeper, more organic, and you have ownership over the projects you’re working on.” Photos from the company’s site show the “playpen for geeks” atmosphere that’s canonical for Silicon Valley start-ups. The founders pose shoulder to shoulder as they tell the familiar story of founding the company from their dorm rooms at MIT, a start-up story familiar from Amazon to Oracle.
Evisort currently has offices in Boston, Massachusetts, and Silicon Valley, California, plus they have announced the grand opening of a new headquarters at San Mateo, California. With this much growth, it’s hardly a surprise that they’re welcoming new candidates as fast as they can apply.
