On Tuesday, professional and legal services company Harbor announced that it has acquired U.K.- based legal technology services provider Ascertus, which helps clients implement document and content management solutions such as iManage.

Harbor CEO Matt Sunderman told Legaltech News that the acquisition was motivated in large part by Harbor's desire to expand its global footprint. He explained that the company wants "to be able to provide global services to anything that we do. And a lot of what we were doing, pre-Ascertus, wasn't necessarily fulfilling that for our clients."

He added, "So two examples of that would have been our work in document management or content management and collaboration, was predominantly a North American business for us, also our corporate legal focus … Ascertus expands our document management and content management collaboration truly to be a global practice. And also the client base that they served was equal parts law firms and large corporations, so it allows us to extend our corporate business from North America to the U.K. and other parts of [Asia Pacific]."