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The number of matter management solutions on the legal tech market grew by one this week. On Tuesday, alternative legal service provider Elevate released its new cloud-based Ecosystem Legal Management, or ELM, software, a single platform through which users can pursue tasks such as matter management, contract and e-signature management, reporting and budgeting or billing.

Kim Lanza-Russo, director of product management at Elevate, indicated that the company was targeting a lingering problem inside of corporate legal departments, which are in some cases deploying a variety or patchwork of solutions to deal with the various needs inside their organization. The result is that data can very quickly become siloed across multiple applications or email accounts.

"One of the challenges that you see there is that you end up with a lot of point solutions and it's very hard to integrate the data. It's very hard to get any intelligence from the data. You can spend years just figuring out how you bring that together," Lanza-Russo said.

Elevate already offers services pertaining to tasks like contract management and document or legal invoice review, but bringing a technical solution like ELM software to the market puts them in the company of other products geared toward helping attorneys or legal departments manage the data hidden inside the various aspects of their business.

Knowable, for instance, released its Contracts Data Management Platform last February, designed to help users host, organize and analyze their contract data. E-billing tools have also become more sophisticated about the management and review of data, with clients more concerned about tracking metrics like law firm rates post-COVID-19.

"We see a renewed interest in the costs savings side that, quite frankly, when we launched the company we didn't see as much of," Nathan Wenzel, co-founder of SimpleLegal, told Legaltech News.

However, Elevate is hoping to achieve a measure of differentiation by bringing the data associated with multiple disciplines—such as contracts, e-billing or project management—together under one roof. Lanza-Russo stressed that Elevate has built interconnectivity into the ELM software at the ground level, designing it so that the product can connect not only with other company products but third-party systems as well.

The challenge was to incorporate that scalability while still delivering functionality and a brief implementation window straight out-of-the-box, something that has become increasingly sought after by legal departments. Modules around managing requests and managing matters were released this week, with another module devoted to managing outside counsel on target for sometime near September.

Developing the architecture necessary to continuously extend and add onto the product took time. "You know that there's going to be changes and places where you have to pivot and grow and that's what's probably taken us a little longer than let's just roll out a matter software module and let's get it out in three months," Lanza-Russo said.

But Elevate isn't the only company in the legal space attempting to fill a demand for greater interconnectivity among platforms. Last week, for example, knowledge integration platform Onna announced that it had completed a $27 million Series B funding round. It will be leveraged toward improving the company's application-spanning search function, which is powered by machine learning.