Boise, Idaho. Photo Credit: Charles Knowles/Shutterstock.com

Parsons Behle & Latimer is having a busy summer.

The Salt Lake City-based firm has absorbed a smaller shop in Idaho, its second such acquisition in the state in as many years, to raise its head count to about 150 lawyers. At the same time, the firm has developed a legal technology subsidiary branded Parsons Behle Lab that it states is focused on developing more efficient ways to handle legal work.

The two Idaho-based combinations have brought a total of nine lawyers to Parsons Behle, which now has more than 25 lawyers in the Gem State, with offices in Boise and Idaho Falls. The combination with Boise's Greener Burke Shoemaker, announced on July 31, brought five lawyers to Parsons Behle.

Firm founder Richard Greener, a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, is among those making the move to Parsons Behle, along with fellow name partners Christopher Burke and Fredric Shoemaker, along with two associates. (Parsons Behle partner Francis Wikstrom in Salt Lake is a past president of the ACTL.) The new additions specialize in complex litigation, as well as some transactional work.

In June 2017, Parsons Behle opened an office in Idaho Falls—the largest city in the state after Boise—when it absorbed four lawyers from local firm Moffatt Thomas. The rest of the latter subsequently joined forces with Hawley Troxell, one of Idaho's largest firms. Parsons Behle now has 26 lawyers in the state.

Parsons Behle's combination with Greener Burke fits into a broader trend of continued merger activity in the legal industry. Through the first six months of this year there have been 51 law firm tie-ups, many of them in smaller markets, according to a recent analysis by legal consultancy Altman Weil Inc. That puts 2018 on track for another strong year of merger activity. In 2017, there were a record 102 mergers, according to Altman Weil's MergerLine.

As it builds out its presence in the Northwest, Parsons Behle is also looking to innovate.

As noted by sibling publication LegalTech News, the Parsons Behle Lab launched earlier this year when its first product, an automated compliance tool for the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation data privacy regulations, went live in March.

The lab is run by Kimball Dean Parker, a Parsons Behle associate in Salt Lake who also oversees LawX, a legal design lab at Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School. LawX garnered attention this year for a website its students developed to help litigants fight debt collection cases without a lawyer.

Parker, a University of Chicago Law School graduate, previously worked as an associate at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in Silicon Valley, where he also earned plaudits for developing a website that used crowdsourcing to develop “legal maps” to guide nonlawyers through legal processes.

Parsons Behle Lab claims it will launch multiple legal tech products each year that utilize automation, data analytics and design thinking in an effort to change the flagging trajectory of tech adoption by lawyers. The firm's website states that automation, data analytics and artificial intelligence have been adopted by industries “to great advantage” within the past 20 years.

“Despite this swirl of technological change, the law has largely stayed the same,” according to Parsons Behle. “Lawyers draft documents in the same way they did 20 years ago. Law firms sit on mountains of data, but don't leverage their knowledge base. And lawyers use the same tired technologies they used decades ago.”

Hal Pos, vice chairman and president of Parsons Behle, did not immediately return a request for comment. In addition to its offices in Boise, Idaho Falls and Salt Lake, the firm also has outposts in Lehi, Utah; Reno, Nevada; and Washington, D.C. Lehi is located just south of Salt Lake in a region known as the Silicon Slopes due to it being a hub for Utah's startup community.