Legal Tech Veteran Assembles Powerhouse Engineering Team to Tackle Critical Pain Point

NEW YORK, May 1, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Coheso, the AI-powered legal intake and work management software platform for in-house legal teams, has announced its emergence from stealth. Co-founders Ned Gannon, Manish Agnihotri, Chirag Mehta, and Aditya Rathod have spent the last year implementing the latest advancements in generative artificial intelligence to empower legal and compliance teams with cutting-edge software to accelerate business objectives while reducing risks and costs.

While engineering, sales, and other corporate departments have benefitted from a plethora of modern software tools to enhance productivity, legal operations teams have been forced to either customize generic tools or build their own internal systems. Simple yet crucial legal workflows related to intake, work management, and work product generation have lagged in innovation relative to other important enterprise-wide functions. This is at a time when 54% of legal department spending is staying in-house, which is up from 40% a decade ago.

Coheso empowers legal and compliance teams to run more streamlined operations, including 25%-70% faster attorney responses, with heightened productivity and data visibility. This results in happier sales, procurement, and other business teams, more consistent adherence to legal and compliance standards throughout the organization, and attorneys who are no longer bogged down by requests that are routine, repetitive, or more appropriate for another department.

The Coheso platform enables business users to submit questions and requests to legal and compliance teams either through the Coheso interface or other platforms already in use at the organization, such as Slack and Outlook. For questions that can be answered based on the company’s policies, contracts, or other documentation, the system’s AI provides immediate responses, together with evidence from the respective documents, either directly back to the business users or to legal / compliance personnel for review and approval. For more complex requests, the system gathers the required information before prioritizing, delegating, and tracking accordingly, while also accelerating legal work product generation.

The Coheso team brings together deep experience in the legal domain, AI, and entrepreneurship, including taking just an idea and turning it into a product used by many of the world’s largest corporate legal departments, law firms, and audit/consulting firms.

Gannon, Cohesoʼs CEO, is a successful serial legal tech entrepreneur, corporate attorney, and Harvard Law graduate. He previously co-founded AI-powered contract analytics pioneer eBrevia and served as CEO from inception through its acquisition by public company DFIN in 2018. Post-acquisition, he was President of DFINʼs eBrevia subsidiary before leaving to start Coheso.

Co-founders Agnihotri, Mehta, and Rathod bring a wealth of experience as data scientists and machine learning engineers. They hold master’s degrees in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon, one of the top universities in the world for AI. Agnihotri, Coheso’s COO & Chief Innovation Officer, has a background in fine-tuning, evaluation, and explainability of LLMs within the legal domain. Previously, he worked as an ML Engineer, developing Zycus’s CLM offering. Mehta, Coheso’s Chief Product Officer, led the charge for the Advanced Analytics team at HP’s Global Customer Support division, enhancing service delivery for over 30 million customer interactions annually. Rathod, Coheso’s Chief Technology Officer, spearheaded the development of legal tech solutions for contract drafting and review at ValueLabs. With a focus on domain-specific training and evaluation, Rathod specializes in optimizing LLM performance within the legal domain.

Rounding out Cohesoʼs leadership team is Jason Schachter, Chief Strategy Officer. A Harvard Law graduate, he was previously VP, Strategy & Operations at eBrevia and an attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell.

“I’ve seen the challenge we’re focused on from both the legal and business sides,” said Gannon. “As an attorney, I often felt pressure to generate work product more quickly while constantly getting distracted by routine and repetitive requests. As someone in charge of a P&L on the business side, I saw how friction in legal could impact business velocity and revenue. Cohesoʼs platform empowers legal and compliance departments to create significantly more value for the business units they serve.”

Investors in Coheso include the venture capital firms Crew Capital, Character, and Firsthand Alliance, as well as Carnegie Mellon University and angel investors such as Thomas Barothy, former Group Legal Chief Operating Officer at UBS.

Coheso will be demoing the platform at the CLOC Global Institute conference on May 6-9 in Las Vegas and at the Legal Innovators California conference on June 4-5 in San Francisco.

Demos are also available upon request through the company’s website www.coheso.ai.

About Coheso

Coheso is a cutting-edge end-to-end operations platform for in-house legal and compliance teams. Powered by AI, Coheso combines centralized intake, including automated responses to routine questions, with an efficient workflow for complex cross-functional tasks. Headquartered in New York, the company is backed by leading venture capital firms including Crew Capital, Character, and Firsthand Alliance as well as Carnegie Mellon University.

Contact: Manish Agnihotri, manish@coheso.ai, 412-954-8113

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SOURCE Coheso, Inc.