Want to know what kind of year this has been for legal technology companies? Consider Evisort.
The company, which provides AI-driven contract management, is today releasing a year-end report that reveals that it has doubled both its revenue and headcount in 2021.
That growth follows the company’s announcement last February that it had raised $35 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $55 million.
It would be naïve to suggest that every legal technology company thrived this year. But this story of record revenues is one I am hearing frequently. Not surprisingly, the story is particularly common among companies providing some form of contracts technology, as that sector of the market has boomed.
Why are companies seeing such growth? No doubt, the pandemic has helped fuel it. The oft-characterized “silver lining” of the pandemic for the legal profession has been the accelerated adoption of technology, particularly cloud technology.
In the world of corporate legal, the pandemic drove an urgent need to better understand what is in a company’s contracts and to better manage the process of creating contracts in the first place.
That is exactly the sweet spot into which Evisort falls. The company was founded in 2016 with a vision of using AI to help companies mine their contracts for insights and key information by turning those contracts’ unstructured text into structured data.
Its platform offers both post-signature contract management, review and analytics and pre-signature contract generation and approval. Its customers include Microsoft and BNY Mellon — the latter having won a global innovation award as a result of its work with Evisort.
Related: How It Works: Evisort, A Leading Provider of Contract Management and AI Solutions.
Evisort says its growth this year is providing momentum for its further development of its platform and the growth of its market share. In October, it launched its Intelligent Dashboarding (pictured above), which it said is the first self-populating dashboard that instantly visualizes contract data and summarizes key metrics without manual data entry.
Other upgrades included new collaboration, negotiation, and redlining features, as well as Salesforce integration.
With regard to doubling its headcount, Evisort said that new hires came from at least 15 states and provinces and included key positions such as director of commercial sales, director of DevOps, and director of quality engineering.
CEO Jerry Ting, who cofounded Evisort while a Harvard Law School student, together with classmate Jake Sussman and MIT student Amine Anoun, says that 2021 was a transformative year for the company.
Related: On LawNext, Evisort CEO Jerry Ting on the Future of CLM and Contracts Tech.
“We set ambitious goals to make groundbreaking technology and expand our community with our first conference and other initiatives, and we accomplished those objectives,” he said.
And now Ting is returning to his law school roots. He and Evisort EVP Memme Onwudiwe, also a Harvard Law alum, will be at the law school this spring to teach a reading group, Startup Entrepreneurship and Innovations in Legal Technology.
The course aims to provide law students with a firm foundation on legal tech entrepreneurship by combining case studies, prominent guest speakers, and supplemental readings.
Seems likely that one of those case studies will be Evisort, itself.
