Sitting down with Evisort CEO Jerry Ting to discuss how legal leaders are influencing business strategy and AI adoption
November 4, 2024 | 5 min min readJerry Ting is the Founder and CEO of Evisort, which was acquired by Workday this September. Before starting the AI contract management platform with his Harvard Law School classmates, Jerry worked in investment banking, consulting, and tech sales, giving him a unique perspective on the intersection of law and business. I had the opportunity to chat with Jerry about this journey shortly after the Workday acquisition was announced. Check out our conversation below.
Alec Sorensen (AS): Evisort has made a substantial case for legal driving business value. But that hasn’t always been the perception. At times, legal has even been seen as an impediment. How have you seen legal’s role in business evolve?
Jerry Ting (JT): When we started Evisort In 2016, legal’s business functions typically sat in legal ops, which would function almost independently from the broader legal team. The emergence of legal ops teams was driven by cost pressure, a growing legal technology market that needed educated buyers, and most importantly, reluctance among career lawyers toward touching operations. “I’m a lawyer’s lawyer, a practitioner, deal counsel,” would be the refrain. So running the business of legal was largely delegated, maybe even over-delegated, to legal ops, which gave the discipline the opportunity to flourish.
Since 2022, however, I’ve seen a lot of senior lawyers with VP titles or higher starting to reclaim parts of legal ops, making it part of their overall focus as a leader. This shift has been happening across companies of all shapes and sizes in our customer base. I think it’s a win for legal ops because it gives them more connectivity to the core business. And it’s good for the broader legal team too because it’s long past due that legal leaders think about how to run their organizations in addition to the legal work that’s in front of them.
AS: Double clicking on legal leaders bringing business back into their purview, what can lawyers do to effectively communicate the value of legal to the C-suite or investors?
JT: The best way to illustrate the value of legal to business is to be a legal leader who offers business value, not just legal advice. This can be a mindset shift lawyers struggle with. In law school we’re taught to be experts in a certain area, and if we’re asked about something not in that area, to defer. This might be the right thing to do at a law firm where there’s different practice groups, but when you’re the in-house counsel, you need to be a jack of all trades and more well-rounded.
If you’ve ever sat in an executive team meeting, you’ll hear the marketing person jumping in on sales issues, sales jumping in on product, and product jumping in on customer success. And the whole time, the legal leader is usually quiet because they haven’t been asked a question about legal. What I tell my students at HLS is, just because you’re smart enough to be a lawyer doesn’t mean you’re only smart enough to be a lawyer. The best legal leaders don’t paint themselves into a corner, but instead act as part of the executive team. That means taking a seat at the table and chiming in when you have good thoughts to share, even when it’s not strictly about legal. One of the best CLOs I’ve seen became COO and then president of his organization only after he started winning respect by sharing his opinions about “other” parts of the business. CLOs are company executives, not just legal leaders.
AS: That makes so much sense. Legal sits at the intersection of all these different functions, touching product, customer success, marketing, and sales, whether it’s by way of contracts or IP. So it’s actually in a very good position to influence these issues.
JT: Yes, that’s the carrot. But here’s the stick. I’ve been hearing from CLOs and friends across the Fortune 500 that it was OK to be a lawyer’s lawyer five years ago. Not so much today when efficiency and innovation are at the forefront of executive team conversations. CEOs are promising efficiency and expecting every leader to have a point of view on how they’re going to use AI to do that. And I’ve actually seen legal leaders be shown the door when they didn’t have ideas about how to be a better business partner. So exerting that business influence isn’t just a nice to have anymore. If you’re a CLO, the expectation will be that you’re C-level.
AS: Now that you’ve mentioned AI, we have to talk about it a little bit. Where would you say legal currently is on the AI adoption curve? What have you been hearing from leaders about how they’re thinking about AI today?
JT: I think we’ve seen a huge shift in the last three years, where legal has gone from being laggards in technology adoption to actually being early adopters of AI, and it’s really quite spectacular to watch. What’s more, lawyers are now not only leading the charge in using AI. They’re also the ones figuring out how to bring AI vendors on for their entire organizations, even though they’re still mastering the budgeting and procurement process themselves. So it’s a really weird and exciting time for our industry, to go from having a reputation of resisting change, to becoming buying centers, and now company-wide stewards of AI so quickly, whether that’s through policy setting, risk management, or ethics governance.
We’re currently working with one of the largest banks in the world, and we’re the first AI vendor to go through their AI review committee. The chair of the committee is a lawyer who oversees data security, privacy, and compliance, and he actually asked for our help in providing feedback to improve this new process. I share this story to point out that it’s a lawyer who’s been tasked from a policy and compliance perspective to drive this change in the organization globally. We’re seeing this day in and day out. And I think this new role lawyers are playing is accelerating the pace of change.
AS: That’s fascinating. You’re right, lawyers are in a great position to take the lead on ensuring that AI is rolled out with minimal risk. What do you think the legal industry is going to look like after the dust of early adoption settles in say, 5 years? Especially the relationship between in-house and outside counsel?
JT: We’re in the middle of a storm right now, so it’s really hard to say, but the trend will be to automate work before it’s given to outside counsel, similar to outsourcing work to lower-cost regions. We just worked on one of the largest M&A deals of the year, and we were able to automate over 70% of the work for our client before it went to outside counsel, with a team of in-house lawyers’ review and blessing of course. So I think in-house teams are going to get much more sophisticated on what kind of work needs to go to outside counsel. And I think outside counsel will no longer be viewed as an extra pair of hands, but as specialty experts. ALSPs will get a lot more sophisticated and adopt technology as well, threatening the law firm model even more and getting law firms to adopt AI too. But across the entire value chain, from in-house to ALSPs and consulting firms to managed service providers and law firms, all of them will start to use AI.
AS: Switching gears, I’d be remiss not to touch on IP in this conversation. How have you thought about the concept of IP — whether that’s ideas, secrets, or patents — and how have you protected your competitive advantage over your journey with Evisort?
JT: For Evisort, IP has always been extremely important as we started at our core as an AI research company. If a company wants to commercialize its IP portfolio, it has to have all its IP checks in place and advertise its IP to the world. That’s the growth and distribution stage of a company and IP’s lifecycle. But in the beginning, it’s the opposite. You’re still experimenting, testing, and iterating, so you want to get it fully baked before telling the world about it. For me, this swing illustrates how IP really depends on the stage of your company and what the needs are as it evolves and matures.
Currently, Evisort thinks in multiple layers of protection when it comes to IP. There are no silver bullets. For our most established technologies, our crown jewels, we have a couple of patent families. But with how fast technology is innovating right now, especially in generative AI, it’s a moving goal post. So I think trade secrets are also really important.
AS: When it comes to IP and IP strategy, is there anything you’d share with early stage founders that they’ll thank you for later?
IP changed Evisort’s trajectory. One of my greatest learnings as a founder was that if you do IP correctly, you can go to market “indirectly” by becoming a strategic IP partner to larger companies. Large companies don’t have the ability, time, or focus to build deep tech competitively, so they look to license IP and launch partnerships to complement their core technology. Because we knew how to protect and commercialize ours, we had an effectively monetized partnership strategy that presented new opportunities for growth. Now, we have access to growth axes that would’ve been much harder to get to on our own.
