Joining a growing number of law firms entering the tech business, Reed Smith announced the launch of GravityStack,  a spin-off subsidiary technology group that will create and license the firms' technology products and provide managed services to law firm and legal department clients.

Bryon Bratcher, head of practice support at Reed Smith and now the managing director of GravityStack, described the new U.S.-based subsidiary as a “data-driven technology group trying to tackle some of the challenges that come up both in litigation transactions and compliance areas of law.”

The new subsidiary, which is wholly owned by Reed Smith, will act as an internal development incubator for new legal technology that it will design, test and license out to legal clients. GravityStack, though, will operate in a few others areas as well. “One is legal technology and systems counseling,” Bratcher said, noting that the group will help clients analyze their data and recommended, implement and optimize legal technology systems.

GravityStack will also offer deployments of teams of data scientists and developers to help clients manage their structured and unstructured data, to enable them to “gain insights that they may not have already known about in their business, or giving them a more defensible positioning,” Bratcher added.

What's more, the group will have a managed legal services operation that will focus on a wide range of services, including “litigation e-discovery, managed transactional contract support, virtual deal rooms, and due diligence risk analysis,” Bratcher said.

As a part of the GravityStack's launch, Reed Smith also announced it will be licensing its e-discovery analytics and business intelligence tool Periscope through the new subsidiary. Periscope, which was created by the firm in 2014, has been internally used at Reed Smith to help clients manage e-discovery spend and efficiency.

Bratcher described Periscope as “basically a data warehouse” that sits on top of the Relativity e-discovery platform to track “the speed and accuracy of document reviewers at the individual level.” In addition, Periscope can also connect with a firm's financial system to track e-discovery project spend, and connect with data processing software to measure and track the size of cases.

By aggregating and analyzing all the data the platform collects, “we can now identify any reviewer that has ever touched our systems over the past few years, the various bureaus, the various firms, the various outside providers, and we can match the best ones to the specific type of cases,” Bratcher said.

The impetus to launch GravityStack came in large part because Reed Smith's clients expressed a desire for a “one-stop-shop” legal services company. Clients told the firm that while there are legal technology companies, legal consulting groups and law firms they rely on, “there is nothing that really harnesses all three of those together,” Bratcher said.

“So GravityStack is really formed as tying to be a polarizing force that brings all those things together—the technology, the business process, and also the legal expertise from Reed Smith as a partner—to deliver a collective intelligence of law,” he added.

To be sure, Reed Smith is far from the only law firm entering the legal technology business. Global law firms Dentons' Nextlaw subsidiaries, for instance, allows it to invest in new legal technology startups and solutions. There are also firms like U.K.-based firms TLT and Slaughter and May that have invested directly in legal technology companies, and in TLT's case, acted at their licensor as well.

Meanwhile, firms like Robins Kaplan and Perkins Coie, have developed internal legal tech solutions around certain practices area like intellectual property and patents that they offer exclusively to their clients.

Reed Smith has been active in promoting and developing legal technology before it created GravityStack. The law firm has recently launched a tech program for summer associates, a data breach notification assessment app, and took a stake in artificial intelligence contract review platform Heretik, which it has a hand in developing.

The launch of GravityStack was a recognition by the firm that “the legal market is certainly changing and has been changing and there is much more demand for operational efficiency,” Bratcher said. “Reed Smith knows that legal expertise is king for our clients, they need that, but now there's sort of this whole redefinition of value, the need [to] be operational efficient in the delivery of [legal services].”

He added that the shift in the market poses an existential pitfall for legal companies not willing or able to adapt. “If law firms aren't at least thinking in this way, to be at operationally efficient, they could be in trouble down the road, because our clients are certainly demanding that.”