Former Latham & Watkins lawyer Nic Vetta has announced the launch of eponymous AI-native law firm Vetta, designed to facilitate commercial contracts to create a legal bridge between private capital and investment-backed firms.
The newly-established firm combines lawyers and engineers to manage commercial contracting, enabling the legal work to be processed, while engineers build technology alongside to complete tasks more swiftly and systematically.
The aim is to hand clients faster contract turnaround and to accumulate predictable fees, maintaining a clear record of the obligations, risks and contractual positions that a business has undertaken.
London-based Vetta wrote on LinkedIn that the idea to create his new firm stemmed from a sixth-month spell at global investment firm Carlyle Group, where he witnessed how portfolio firms operated.
“Private equity-backed companies are expected to move quickly," he said. "They win customers, hire, procure and acquire, and each of those activities produces contracts. Legal resource does not always grow at the same rate.
“A business may have one in-house lawyer, or none at all, while the number of contracts keeps multiplying. Different teams negotiate different terms. Acquisitions bring in contracts from other businesses. Over time, it becomes harder to answer a basic question: what, exactly, has the company agreed to?”
Vetta said describing the firm as AI native meant examining each legal process from the beginning, in terms of deciding which tasks are repetitive or need judgment, what software can do reliably and what work should stay with lawyers.
“We build the workflow around those answers, so that lawyers spend their time on judgement and software handles the rest,” he added.
Vetta was a corporate lawyer for Latham & Watkins for two years before launching his new firm this month, during which he was a legal secondee at Carlyle Group. Earlier he also had a brief stint as an advisor at JP Morgan.
Other recent launches in the legaltech market include an AI-powered outside counsel management tool launched last week by the enterprise legal management business unit of Dutch multinational Wolters Kluwer.
Earlier this month, Belgian legaltech start-up LegalFly also established a new platform to give clients an AI-powered view of their contracts throughout their entire lifecycle.
The company said the new contract intelligence tool would help lawyers with contract drafting onwards, identifying important terms alongside obligations within a contract.
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