Harvard Law School is teaming up with artificial intelligence-powered contract platform Evisort to help provide a course on legaltech entrepreneurship and innovation.

Evisort founding members and Harvard Law graduates Jerry Ting and Memme Onwudiwe will be teaching on the course in March next year alongside other global business leaders to share expertise on the legaltech sector and alternative career paths for law students. The course will also offer insights on how tech can transform legal operations, tips to secure venture capital funding and networking opportunities with industry insiders.

Ting said: “The class is a culmination of our experience in building a successful legaltech startup, and also advances our advocacy for law students and lawyers to find rewarding career paths which include legaltech and operations and alternative legal services. Evisort’s AI technology is changing how transactional law is practised and we see ourselves as a change agent in providing creative business opportunities for lawyers.”

Ting founded Evisort in 2016 in the Harvard Innovation Lab alongside fellow Harvard classmates and an MIT graduate student. Ting is now CEO and chairman, helping the contract management start-up raise more than $55m of venture capital funding from investors including General Atlantic, Microsoft and Global Village. Onwudiwe is executive vice president of legal and business intelligence at the firm.

The global legaltech market has been hotting up this year, with a number of firms attracting significant sums of funding and M&A interest. In August, document management company Litera Microsystems purchased AI contract review platform Kira for an undisclosed sum. Meantime, US legaltech provider Intapp raised $273m by going public in June, valuing the company at about $1.6bn. That came after Canadian legaltech provider Clio raised $110m from a Series E funding round in April that also pushed its valuation to $1.6bn. 

At the same time, law firms are ramping up their efforts to support fledgling tech companies. Last month, magic circle firm Slaughter and May signed up to Tech Nation’s Future Fifty Campaign, a programme designed to support 50 of the most promising late-stage UK tech companies through workshops, one-to-one mentoring, networking and technical training. And earlier this month, Linklaters teamed up with Softbank on a diversity-led accelerator programme that seeks to support underrepresented start-up founders.