Nicholas (Nik) Reed has been named chief executive officer of contracts analytics and management company Knowable, after having been the company’s senior vice president, product and research development since 2019.

Mark Harris, who had been Knowable’s CEO ever since the company was spun off from alternative legal services provider Axiom in 2019, will assume the rule of chairman of the board of the company, which operates as a joint venture with LexisNexis.

“Nik’s vision and deep expertise in legal technology, and tailoring language-based AI to legal use cases, make him the ideal leader to guide Knowable into its next chapter of innovation and growth,” Harris said in a statement on the company’s website. “His background at legal analytics powerhouse Ravel Law and experience building our product over the last five years into a trusted platform our clients are thrilled to use, uniquely positions him to capitalize on the tremendous opportunities ahead as legal tech continues to rapidly evolve.”

In 2012, Reed and his Stanford Law School classmate Daniel Lewis, now CEO of LegalOn, cofounded the legal research company Ravel Law, where he was chief operating officer. In 2017, LexisNexis acquired Ravel, and Reed became vice president of product strategy, leading the integration of Ravel’s visualization and analytics tools into the LexisNexis legal research platform.

In 2019, Reed left LexisNexis to join Knowable. He had come to know about it through the LexisNexis joint venture, and was intrigued by the potential to build the same kinds of analytics around contracts that were by then common in litigation, he told me at the time.

The story of Knowable traces back to 2000, when Harris and Alec Guettel founded Axiom, a pioneering service to provide on-demand legal talent to corporate legal departments, growing it into a major legal services company, while also developing technology and managed services arms.

In February 2019, while gearing up for a possible IPO, Axiom spun off its technology and managed services entities into two new companies: Knowable, which focused on using machine-learning technology to help companies better understand their contracts, and Axiom Managed Services, which later rebranded as Factor, and which offers people, processes and technology to provide outsourced legal help to companies.

With the spin-off, Harris and Guettel moved to Knowable, with Harris as CEO and Guettel as CFO. In July, Knowable announced that it had entered into a joint venture agreement with LexisNexis Legal & Professional, allowing Knowable to continue to operate independently, but with the benefit of LexisNexis’s resources and infrastructure.

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Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.