Ravel Law Founder Nik Reed Joins Knowable as Senior Vice President of Product and R&D

USA/Canada News

03
Dec
2019

Editor

Knowable, a leader in enterprise contract intelligence, today announced it has named Nicholas (Nik) Reed as senior vice president of product and R&D. As a co-founder and COO at Ravel Law – which was acquired by LexisNexis in 2017 and eventually relaunched as Context – Reed was instrumental in developing the legal industry’s only case law language analytics tool.

Earlier this year, LexisNexis and Knowable announced a joint venture in which Knowable will continue to operate independently while also benefiting from access to LexisNexis’ leading brand, resources and infrastructure.

Before accepting the new position, Reed was vice president of product strategy at LexisNexis. He led Ravel Law’s integration into the LexisNexis analytics portfolio, transforming the company’s flagship product into what is now known as Context, which analyzes the language of individual judges’ to find arguments they find most persuasive and uses data analytics to vet expert witnesses. Prior to Ravel Law, Reed worked as a management consultant in corporate/M&A strategy at Accenture and as a research analyst for Merrill Lynch. Reed will report directly to Knowable CEO Mark Harris, working with Knowable’s world-class engineering team to help the enterprise contract analytics leader accelerate its expansion and growth into new markets.

“The growth opportunities for both the industry and for Knowable are tremendous. This new position is the perfect opportunity to combine my M&A experience and my years applying machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to legal language into a single role,” said Reed. “AI can be great for a lot of reasons, but it is not the perfect solution for every challenge.  Knowable is focused on applying AI in the right places while keeping human experts in the loop, and I am excited to be a part of that.”

Reed graduated from Stanford Law in 2012, bypassing a traditional legal career to helping build and launch Ravel Law, which was acquired by LexisNexis some five years later. Since announcing its joint venture with LexisNexis in July 2018, Harris has been focused on assembling both the team and infrastructure to build on Knowable’s ML and NLP capabilities, tapping Reed for his expertise in the space.

“I am thrilled to be able to work alongside Nik to build Knowable’s future in the legal industry and to help reshape that industry by converting unstructured contract data into actionable intelligence that can drive better decision-making by corporations,” Harris said.

Knowable supports many of the world’s largest companies, including Dell, GE and Nestlé USA, providing machine learning-enabled contract data analytics and related contract intelligence solutions. Knowable provides clients revolutionary visibility into the relationships that govern business activities, mitigates risks, and drives value.