5 Questions with eBrevia Account Director Sophiya Volkova
We are delighted to welcome Sophiya Volkova to eBrevia! Sophiya joins eBrevia’s London office as an account director. She brings deep expertise in legaltech in private practice from her time at Ashurst and Macfarlanes, as well as experience from EY advising in-house legal departments at top financial institutions. Her commitment both to relentless innovation as well as rigor in the practice of law makes her a perfect fit.
eBrevia Account Director Sophiya Volkova
Get to know Sophiya better in 5 quick questions:
eBrevia: You come to us from some incredibly powerful and well-resourced firms. What drew you to a company with a start-up culture?
Sophiya Volkova: The client portfolios and the range of projects I’ve worked on during my career has been incredibly varied. I had been working on driving AI adoption in the Tax function at EY, and it was definitely a rewarding and captivating experience for two main reasons: firstly, there was no blueprint of how to do it (I love a challenge!), and secondly I felt inspired by what I was doing.
I’ve always been passionate about AI and innovation from my Hyperloop days at university to starting a legal tech career after university. Finding ways to encourage people to use technology — particularly AI — and making working lives more exciting was extremely attractive to me. I am thrilled to join eBrevia, an AI-first company with a complete horizontal hierarchy, as I feel I can have a positive impact on the lives of lawyers and contribute to eBrevia’s product development.
eBrevia: How do you think your past experience will benefit eBrevia’s clients?
SV: Having worked at multinational firms has given me insights on eBrevia’s clients’ pain points and requirements; I’ve been on the other side of the equation. Furthermore, the bigger the company, the more tech it tends to have. There are two key takeaways from that:
very often another team sitting in the same office won’t know about an already-purchased tool/solution, loses time looking for a solution, then, much later, discovers their colleagues have already solved a similar problem
hundreds of tools I’ve seen are underutilized and are hard to integrate or use.
I know how important it is to give clients an easy-to-use, highly integratable product with an easy set-up and a great support model. eBrevia ticks all of these boxes.
eBrevia: Are there any areas or projects you’re particularly excited to tackle in your first months at eBrevia?
SV: I’m excited about our upcoming additions in our Gen AI offering: Lens and DraftPro — stay tuned for it!
eBrevia: When it comes to AI, there is some anxiety in the market about a perceived loss of human connection. How do you see AI products facilitating collaboration among staff, teams and departments?
SV: The way technology develops is exponential. Show a rotary phone to a teenager today, I bet you with 99% certainty (there is always a 1% anomaly with a different way of thinking), they will try pressing numbers rather than spinning the wheel for a number. I am not saying that people who don’t know how these phones work are missing out — there is no need for it. One of the questions I also ask myself is: Will people know how to write by hand in the next decade? More importantly, will they need to?
That said, AI develops even faster. You can build an AI agent without knowing code and it can become your personal assistant for free. However, what AI lacks, and I’d argue would take time to get to that level, is human empathy. Imagine you are travelling on the train and forgot to renew your Railcard. AI would not care, it will issue a fine straight away because rules are rules. Every now and then though you can still find an empathetic railway employee who would say: "Just make sure you update it for your next journey,” and you could sigh with relief.
In-person meetings and human-to-human connections in my view are still powerful and we as humans (not all!) but can be empathetic and need empathy. So my ambition in my role as an account director at eBrevia is to get lawyers to outsource contract review to our cutting-edge product and get people to interact with one another — maybe go to a pub quiz at 7pm or volunteer at Arts for all in Shoreditch rather than staying in the office until 2am doing review manually. The latter is not the sort of human interaction that we all need anyway. One can be in the office surrounded by people, with everyone simply pushing to get the review done asap.
eBrevia: If you were the quizmaster, what kind of legaltech trivia would you challenge our clients with?
SV: To double down on the point, I used ChatGPT to write some questions. You’re invited to play on LinkedIn, or use them with your team when eBrevia’s AI lets you leave the office early! We’re aiming to host our own pub quiz night soon as well.
1. “Clause Encounter of the AI Kind”
🧠 Question: What’s the term for software that uses natural language processing to automatically extract key information like indemnity clauses or renewal dates from contracts?
A) Blockchain
B) Predictive coding
C) Contract analytics
D) Smart contracts
(Pun: A play on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” because who doesn’t like a little sci-fi with their legal AI?)
2. “Redlines & Robots”
🧠 Question: Which technology is most commonly used to compare versions of a contract and highlight changes, often called “redlining”?
A) Optical character recognition
B) Document versioning
C) Machine learning
D) Diff algorithms
(Pun: Sounds like a buddy-cop drama between lawyers and bots—Redlines & Robots.)
3. “Due Diligence Déjà Vu”
🧠 Question: During M&A due diligence, AI-powered tools like eBrevia can cut review time by up to what percentage compared to manual review?
A) 10%
B) 30%
C) 60%
D) 90%
Answers: 1. C; 2. D 3. C
Connect with Sophiya on LinkedIn.
About eBrevia
eBrevia is a leader in AI contract analysis and management with clients in the US, UK/Europe, and Asia. For over a decade, eBrevia has served law firms, corporations, audit/consulting companies, and financial institutions, such as Baker McKenzie, Norton Rose Fulbright, Kroll, SAP, Intel, PwC, EY, and MUFG.
