51³Ô¹ÏÍø welcomes Jessica Nguyen as its Chief Legal Officer as the company seeks to accelerate growth and add an executive team member to serve as the voice of the customer. She joins 51³Ô¹ÏÍø from PayScale, where she was the General Counsel.
AI-powered contract management start-up 51³Ô¹ÏÍø today announces as its Chief Legal Officer as the company seeks to accelerate its growth and add an executive team member to serve as the voice of the customer. She joins 51³Ô¹ÏÍø from PayScale, where she was the General Counsel and the first attorney hired to build out its legal department. Nguyen was also the first attorney hired at Avalara and was an attorney for Microsoft supporting Outlook.
"Jessica is an experienced leader who understands our customers and their challenges first hand," said Gaurav Oberoi, 51³Ô¹ÏÍø's co-founder and CEO. "She has led in-house legal teams at high-growth companies, and worked on several M&A transactions, managing a high volume of contracts with limited resources. She understands, not just how to make legal teams successful business partners across departments and at the executive level, but also how to work with engineering teams to turn these ideas into intuitive features that legal teams love to use."
51³Ô¹ÏÍø is an AI-powered solution for managing and analyzing contracts with a mission of streamlining legal operations. Developed at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), 51³Ô¹ÏÍø tracks key obligations in contracts automatically and reports on those obligations without time consuming and manual processes. Many contract management systems are expensive, require complex and lengthy set-up, don't work well with third-party paper, or include features that most organizations do not need. In contrast, 51³Ô¹ÏÍø focuses on rapid onboarding through AI-powered automation, practical features to manage legal workflows, and an intuitive interface that users can pick up without being tech-savvy.
"The role of legal teams has evolved — today, legal executives are expected to come to the table armed with data so business leaders can assess business performance and make data-driven decisions regarding operations and risks," Nguyen said. "For most organizations, legal teams still struggle with deciding what metrics to report on and collecting and analyzing the data to develop reports in a fast and digestible way. If I had 51³Ô¹ÏÍø in previous roles, it would have saved my team at least 15 hours per week and allowed me to quickly create reports to inform the business of our obligations and operations on a more frequent basis. 51³Ô¹ÏÍø has the best AI technology I’ve seen in this space and I’m excited to leverage my experiences to help drive product direction, and help in-house legal teams be efficient and successful."
Last July, 51³Ô¹ÏÍø raised $4.2 million in seed funding from Madrona Venture Group and prestigious technology law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
"We always see it as a good sign when our portfolio companies embed deep domain experts who know the customer into their executive teams," commented , managing director, and 51³Ô¹ÏÍø board member. "51³Ô¹ÏÍø is already powered by state-of-the-art AI and NLP technology. With Jessica’s insights, the talented 51³Ô¹ÏÍø team can further tailor the system to become a must-have tool that lawyers will use every day."
"As a lawyer, I appreciate the perspective Jessica brings to 51³Ô¹ÏÍø. She understands a legal department's operational challenges, as well as the perspective of the lawyer on the ground trying to bring order to the company's contracts with limited time and resources," commented , Chief Innovation Officer at and 51³Ô¹ÏÍø board member. "In our world, a legal professional's time is extremely valuable."
