Jerry Ting, CEO and co-founder of Evisort: Ting, along with a few Harvard Law classmates and collaborators at MIT, began developing Evisort to analyze language in contracts and categorize the content. Although founding Evisort as a startup wasn't necessarily part of Ting's original plan for law school, but decided to dive into the legal tech market after hearing from attorneys about the frustrations of inefficiency in contract work. “Lawyers across every company are struggling to find a way to manage their contracts, and we're excited to be tackling the problem during such an exciting time,” Ting told LTN. Jerry Ting, CEO and co-founder of Evisort
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Contract management company Evisort recently announced it raised $4.5 million, joining other legal tech companies in securing investments early in the year.

The seed funding was led by Village Global and Amity Ventures with participation from Accenture, SAP, Walt Disney executives and an undisclosed partner from Ropes & Gray. Serra Ventures is a new investor, said Evisort co-founder and CEO Jerry Ting.

Evisort's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features include classifying documents by document and contract type and extracting provisions, financial information and other data. For legal, Evisort provides instant analysis of thousands of contracts in a short time frame, allowing attorneys to focus on pertinent data. But the benefits of such speedy analysis also extends to non-law departments. Indeed, Evisort touts its usability for non-lawyers for extracting data from documents for billing and revenue reporting to drive negotiations.

Ting said Evisort, which was the subject of a Columbia University MBA course, will use the $4.5 million investment to hire more data scientists to make its software less reliant on training from users.

“Our goal is to build a solution that is ready out of the box,” Ting said, noting the maturity of the solution allows the AI-powered software to run without prior training. The new investment will also be used to evangelize to companies: “AI is here, commercial and safe to use,” Ting added.

Along with the new investment announcement, Evisort also announced it's set to release a new automated document review solution.

“This is the use case where a lawyer can upload a contract into Evisort, and that contract might be a contract they've never seen before,” Ting said. For legal, the new solution can help with the document review process because it'll read the document first and automatically notify the user of risk areas in the contract, Ting added.

Patrick Yang, a general partner and co-founder of Amity Ventures and an original investor in the company when it began, said in an interview he was excited to see increased usage of Evisort across varying departments.

Evisort's announcement comes a few days after England-based legal tech platform Luminance obtained $10 million in investments from venture capitalists and Slaughter and May. Onit started the new year off with a bang, when the legal enterprise solution provider announced it secured a $200 million investment.