Ex-Paul Weiss Associate Sees AI Boom After Buying Back Company

A former Paul Weiss and Shearman & Sterling associate who this month bought back a legal technology company he co-founded said his decision stemmed from the opportunities he sees with the advent of generative artificial intelligence.

“We’ve reached an inflection point in the evolution and development of AI,” Adam Nguyen, who has returned as chief executive officer of the company, eBrevia, said in an interview. “Automation doesn’t eliminate jobs, it frees people up to do more substantive things.”

Nguyen and co-founder Jacob Mundt bought the contract review and analysis software company they started in 2011 in an all-stock transaction with Donnelley Financial Solutions Inc. Donnelley, a publicly traded financial compliance company, acquired eBrevia in 2018 after being a strategic investor in the startup, Nguyen said.

Adam Nguyen

Donnelley remains an eBrevia client. Other clients include law firms such as Baker McKenzie, three of the Big Four accounting firms, Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., risk analysis and compliance consultancy Kroll LLC, and software giant SAP SE, Nguyen said.

Nguyen declined to discuss the details of his bid for eBrevia. He and Mundt, a computer scientist who is the company’s chief technology officer, will be the only investors in the business and focus on innovating new products. Taft Stettinius & Hollister advised them on the acquisition, Nguyen said.

Now that one of the first legal technology companies to use an early form of AI is back in the hands of two of its co-founders, they plan to experiment with large language models and platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“It’s easy to open up an OpenAI window—everyone seems to have access to it—but that’s not the value,” Nguyen said. “The value is understanding the workflow and designing the processes around the AI.”

‘Tedious Work’

Nguyen and fellow Harvard Law School graduate Edward “Ned” Gannon, another former Big Law associate, formed eBrevia with Mundt in an effort to use technology to cut legal costs after the 2008 financial crisis.

“A lot of associates hate the tedious work that comes with due diligence and document review, clients don’t want to pay top dollar for it, and we thought there must be a better way of automating it,” Nguyen said.

The early days of eBrevia saw its co-founding team experiment with machine learning and natural language processing, said Nguyen, adding it took five years for the company to prove there was a market for its products. Despite such challenges, eBrevia weathered the competition.

Gannon left eBrevia earlier this year to embark on his own venture, but Nguyen, who had left in 2021, wanted to return, citing other entrepreneurial comebacks, such as Steve Jobs returning in 1997 to Apple Inc. and Dave Portnoy buying back Barstool Sports this year from Penn Entertainment Inc.

“This isn’t something I would’ve done three years ago,” Nguyen said. “What I saw lacking the last few years was that startup, entrepreneurial mindset that the company used to have, to take risks, move quickly, and find solutions.”

An independent eBrevia is now able to license third-party artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT to create a system that clients can teach to focus on areas they’re interested in, although humans—whether they be accountants, bankers, or lawyers—are still responsible for the final work product.

Nguyen said eBrevia’s primary services are contract review and management, compliance, due diligence, and business intelligence.

“We proved the technology could enhance the value of work by making it more efficient and accurate,” he said.