“What we look for is franchise tech companies that we think can be category leaders,” says Helekar. This offers huge potential for the Series C lead investor and TCV general partner Amol Helekar, who likens Evisort to others in the venture firm’s portfolio: Spotify, Netflix and fellow legaltech unicorn Clio. Today, the company’s revenue is exclusively generated by software licensing. With $1 million in funding and a handful of clients, Ting and his cofounders moved to San Mateo, California, and hired two people in their first year as a venture-backed company. In 2016, his better way-a version of Evisort that included the ability to analyze contracts from Google Drive and Dropbox-caught the attention of Village Global, the venture capital shop funded by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. And like most startup founders, he imagined a better way.

But later, as he worked for MIT graduate student researcher Amine Anoun, he realized that firms bill hundreds of dollars per hour for lawyers to simply read documents. Wanting to better represent people like his father, Ting enrolled in Harvard Law School one year after graduating from the University of Southern California. Acting as a translator for his Chinese engineer father in a civil suit litigated in 2008, Ting watched his family shell out $85,000 in legal fees–only to settle the case for just $5,000. Ting first realized these inefficiencies in the legal system when he was a Bay Area high school student. “I think lawyers will definitely still be needed to provide sophisticated advice and counsel to clients, but I think these tools will address some of the pain points that particularly transactional lawyers have had in our practice, and it will make us faster and more efficient.” “I don’t think will replace lawyers at all,” she says. Bernice Grant, senior director of Fordham School of Law’s Entrepreneurial Law Program, views Evisort’s journey as catalyzing legal startups and freeing lawyers from menial labor.

However, Evisort’s Series C round is especially notable because innovation and venture backing in the legal space is rare.

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