Wendell Jisa and the lesson in the rearview mirror

Wendell Jisa’s father gave him a rearview mirror during his first week working in legal copies. Jisa was out of college, delivering documents to law firms, and the gift came with an explanation: remember the people coming up behind you. A father had managed to turn a car accessory into a performance review.

Jisa remembered the lesson decades later. Competition meant finding another way to improve, whether through effort, investment or invention. The delivery work gave way to legal services, then to software. The documents remained. They became digital, accumulated in new places and demanded better ways of finding what mattered.

By October 2025, Jisa was making a different sort of decision. He would leave the CEO job at Reveal, the legal technology company he had founded, and become chairman. Eric Harmon would take over daily leadership. The founder who had learned to watch who was catching up would now help another executive take the wheel.

A mirror before a software company

His route into the industry was thoroughly practical. At Chicago Legal Copies, the work included delivering boxes. Later came Landmark, the legal services business he founded before Reveal. His education was at Loyola University Chicago, where he studied communications and English literature. The career that followed placed him among lawyers, their documents and the people responsible for getting those documents into usable shape.

Legal discovery supplies a particular kind of business problem. A dispute or investigation generates a need to collect and examine records. Some contain evidence; many contain little that helps. Someone has to distinguish between them. As the material moves from paper into email and workplace communication systems, the job changes in scale and form. The obligation to understand it survives every upgrade.

Reveal dates its beginnings to 2008. Jisa had already seen an industry that could be slow to change its technology. His interest lay in improving that work over years, even when he could not know how long the change would take. The horizon he described was measured in decades. The first delivery job and the later software business belonged to the same long apprenticeship.

The neighbor becomes a colleague

One of the relationships behind Reveal’s expansion began with a shared address. Jisa and Jay Leib, the entrepreneur behind NexLP, worked out of the same Chicago building. Their teams got to know one another, worked together and connected their technology before Reveal acquired NexLP in 2020.

When the two appeared with George Socha that September, Jisa talked about the people as readily as the product. Leib joined Reveal as executive vice president of innovation and strategy. Socha, a co-founder of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, had joined too. Their conversation moved between software development, the experience of practitioners and the people who would use the result.

It also wandered into superheroes and video games. Leib was enthusiastic about both. Jisa allowed for a much narrower gaming history, reaching back to Tecmo Bowl on Nintendo. Amid a discussion of artificial intelligence, there was room for a football game from an earlier technological age. An acquisition announcement rarely allows its participants that much personality.

A bigger company, in several moves

January 2021 brought the Brainspace merger and an investment of more than $200 million from K1 Investment Management in the combined organization. NexLP’s AI technology and Brainspace’s visual analytics would sit alongside Reveal’s processing and document review capabilities. The aim was to bring more of the discovery work into a connected environment.

That combination carried a practical proposition. A legal team could move through different stages of a matter with related tools, rather than treating each stage as a separate technical undertaking. Analytics could help identify useful material. Review software could help people examine it. Capital supplied the means to develop and combine the products, while the acquired teams brought knowledge of the work itself.

In August 2023, Reveal acquired Logikcull and IPRO. K1 funded the transactions, which were announced as valued at more than $1 billion. The resulting business said it would serve more than 4,000 customers and have employees in over two dozen countries. The expansion reached across different kinds of legal work and different sizes of customer.

Logikcull brought an approachable, self-service product into the mix. IPRO contributed its established discovery capabilities and international reach. Jisa’s explanation centered on giving customers more control over their workflows. A solo practitioner and a large enterprise might share the need to find relevant documents, but the matters on their desks would place different demands on the software.

The next significant addition, Onna, arrived in May 2024. Its role was closer to the beginning of the process: connecting to cloud-based collaboration tools and collecting unstructured data. The acquisition extended Reveal’s reach into the places where modern working conversations accumulate. Before anyone can analyze a record, someone has to collect it.

Four letters on the office wall

Jisa’s account of the company’s culture had a piece of office typography at its center. A wall sign read “Do your job,” with “OUR” highlighted. Three words performed two duties. The instruction was individual; the emphasized letters made the responsibility collective.

In January 2021, he described arriving early so he could get home to his children, and keeping his office open for informal morning conversations. One inside-sales employee came in to thank him for his leadership. Jisa remembered that exchange as the high point of a week that also contained a major merger.

“I’m hardly a luminary.”

Wendell Jisa, opening a January 2021 conversation with George Socha

His life outside the company included public office. He served on Riverside’s village board; his LinkedIn record dates that service from April 2017 to May 2021. He is also a lifelong Notre Dame Fighting Irish fan. The football allegiance has lasted rather longer than his Nintendo habit.

There were occasional encounters with a different kind of public life. At Legalweek in 2024, he introduced opening keynote speaker Bryan Cranston. Legal technology conferences do sometimes provide a break from document review.

The year he changed his own job

Recognition arrived before the handoff. Jisa received a Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024. In June 2025, EY named him an Entrepreneur Of The Year Midwest Award winner, in a regional program covering Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. An independent judging panel considered growth, long-term value and entrepreneurial commitment.

Product work continued. In August 2025, Reveal announced the name aji for its generative AI document review technology and offered access from its September launch through the end of that year without charge. Its design included calibration tools, an AI advisor and a choice between generative AI and hybrid review modes.

The offer addressed an adoption problem Jisa had spent years discussing: getting legal professionals comfortable with new ways of working. Teams would have an opportunity to try the technology on matters, refine their approach and learn its operation. The offer had a calendar attached to it, ending on December 31, 2025. It belonged to that launch period.

There was another practical choice in the same period. In July 2025, Reveal expanded its private deployment group under Jamie Inghram. Customers could use the software on their own premises, in a private cloud or through hybrid arrangements, alongside the company’s SaaS offering. Jisa presented control over infrastructure as part of the product’s appeal. Buying a new tool would not require every customer to make the same decision about where its data should live. It was another instance of the flexibility he had emphasized through the acquisitions, applied to the machinery beneath the software.

On October 14, Jisa announced his move to chairman. He described a deliberate change toward long-term guidance and support for the next CEO. Harmon brought experience from Trustwave, DXC Technology, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and McKinsey. Jisa emphasized the importance of finding someone who could carry the company’s culture forward alongside the business.

He also put his family into the explanation. Reveal had occupied an enormous part of his life. The new arrangement would allow him more time with his family of five, while preserving his connection to customers, partners and company strategy. Succession was a business decision with a personal timetable.

Three chairs, a different kind of work

The next appointments followed quickly. Clearbrief named Jisa board chairman on November 6, 2025. Its founder and CEO, Jacqueline Schafer, was building an AI legal writing application that worked inside Microsoft Word. Jisa would support another founder in a neighboring part of the legal workflow, where evidence becomes research, verification and drafting.

On December 3, FranConnect appointed him executive chairman. The company provides software for franchise and multi-location businesses, a different customer world from legal discovery. Its announcement described a role working with executive leadership on scalable AI products and growth. His experience building and combining software businesses would now be applied beyond the market where he had spent his career.

These roles gave shape to the intentions he had outlined when leaving Reveal’s CEO job. He wanted to mentor founders and operating CEOs and invest in entrepreneurs working in SaaS and enterprise software. At Reveal, he would remain available to Harmon and involved in long-term direction.

The rearview mirror is a memorable beginning because it is so tangible. A young employee receives an object he can hold, together with a lesson he will keep repeating. Years later, the founder has a company to hand over and other founders to help. Jisa’s next work will take place beside the person running the business, with room in the day for the family he said he wanted to see more often.