After spinning off from ALSP market leader Axiom, co-founders Mark Harris and Alec Guettel started Knowable and entered a joint venture with LexisNexis. Two years later, the story is still unfolding as Knowable has taken the learnings from their time leading Axiom, a people-powered company to building a tech-enabled platform focused squarely on enabling enterprise-wide visibility into your entire contract portfolio at scale – something that can’t be done accurately or efficiently by legal teams alone.
Co-founder and CFO, Alec Guettel chats with Artificial Lawyer founder Richard Tromans about what makes Knowable different from a CLM, and why the time is now for enterprises to rethink decades-old contract management strategies that simply can’t keep up with the thousands of questions that stakeholders need answered each day.
Here’s an excerpt:
‘We think it’s inevitable that everyone [in the corporate world] will access the data in their contracts, as it’s where their most valuable data is.
‘When we were part of Axiom we would do review projects for clients, e.g. for M&A, and sometimes the client would say: could you do this for ALL of our contracts? It was an epiphany.’
But, there was a challenge. They didn’t have the tech yet to really provide what they wanted. A genuinely useful digital dashboard that has imbibed 10,000s, or even 100,000s, of contracts across a company’s various divisions and national bases, was going to be hard to make with just manual labour. Then came the joint venture with LexisNexis, which had bought RAVEL and LexMachina, and developed plenty of NLP know-how.
Now they are there. And it’s great timing.