LexisNexis office in Toronto. Credit: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock.com

LexisNexis Legal & Professional has not been shy about investing in analytics technologies in recent years, with Lex Machina and Ravel Law among the acquisitions they've made to bolster their data suite. Now, the company is moving into contract analytics, forming a venture with data analytics company Knowable.

The two announced on July 18 that the companies have entered into an agreement to form a joint venture via LexisNexis investment in Knowable. Through the deal, Knowable will remain independent, though will receive access to LexisNexis' brand, resources and infrastructure, according to a press release announcing the deal.

Knowable spun off from alternative legal service provider Axiom in February 2019 as it prepared for an IPO. Axiom co-founders Mark Harris and Alec Guettel will lead Knowable as CEO and CFO, respectively. No financial details of the transaction have been made public at this time.

Focused heavily on the enterprise contract space, Knowable's technology offerings include machine-learning enabled data analytics and related contract intelligence solutions. The company boasts more than 25 million contract data elements analyzed each quarter and engagements with more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500, according to the Knowable's website.

Ritu Khanna, executive vice president of strategy and business development at LexisNexis, told Legaltech News that new partners for data analytics and decision tools are always on the company's radar, and the opportunity to work with Knowable's Harris and Guettel “worked out perfectly for us.”

“We really appreciate the vision and the thinking that Mark and his team are bringing around unstructured data, particularly in contracts, into understandable analytics and data that can drive actions and decision-making on behalf of our customers, both in law firms and in corporations,” Khanna added. “We think that it's a solution that's really ahead of the pack, and it's going to transform how our customers make decisions.”

Harris noted to Legaltech News that contracts have a great effect on the corporate market in particular given that they are “the backbone of business,” though in their current unstructured form they are hard to mine for actionable insights. “Those contracts are basically codifying all commercial activity, and they sit inside corporations as one of those great underleveraged, undermanaged information assets,” Harris explained. “There is so much intelligence and potential impact sitting inside those contracts, but today it's very hard to get at.”

That's what his team is hoping to fix—Harris said that after the deal, he expects Knowable to continue largely as it has, perhaps broadening its suite of offerings in the next couple of years. The differentiation for Knowable's technology, he believes, will be the product's data accuracy rate (Knowable boasts 98 percent accuracy on its website) and its access to raw data to train its systems.

Coupled with LexisNexis' backing, Knowable's leaders are excited for the future. “Together we've come up with this structure that I think is going to really empower us to build a great business and do it in a way that makes sense in this space, for this team and for our clients,” Harris said.

LexisNexis' recent analytics acquisitions have increasingly become integrated into the company's overall analytics suite in recent months. Ravel Law, for instance, is largely behind the Lexis Advance's Context offering, which just introduced its first expansion in Context for Courts this week. The company also introduced an intelligent 'Research Assistant' for Lexis Advance at Legalweek 2019, and have integrated analytics into other LexisNexis legal-focused products such as CounselLink as well.

This article has been updated with comments from LexisNexis and Knowable.