Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from the Reinventing Professionals podcast, hosted by legal technology speaker and consultant Ari Kaplan, provided to Legaltech News. In this episode, Kaplan spoke with Brian McManus, the CEO of Lighthouse eDiscovery, a provider of technology-enabled e-discovery and consulting services, which recently merged with Discovia, a company that provides similar technology and services. Although Lighthouse eDiscovery is not a client of Ari Kaplan Advisors LLC, it has been a subscriber to the consulting firm's E-Discovery Unfiltered market research series.

Ari Kaplan: Lighthouse recently merged with Discovia. How has that combination impacted what you offer your clients?

Brian McManus: Discovia is a very complementary business to ours, and that benefits our clients in that the organization now has more skill and a deeper set of talent able to help them solve their problems. Two of the things that we feel particularly excited about are that one, we have a much bigger consulting team to help our clients tackle the problems they are having with information governance, and data migration to the cloud and Office 365. And two, we have a much deeper set of engineering resources, which allow us to further automate the platforms that we utilize to create customized solutions for our clients, like our smart series portal.

AK: How have changes in the industry increased the demand for more dynamic consulting?

BM: There are just so many new data types and an evolution of data to the cloud and Office 365. Specifically, Microsoft's acquisition of Equivio and the integration of e-discovery functionality into Office 365 is revolutionizing the industry. Compliance, legal and risk management teams together with their respective IT groups are struggling with how to manage all of this data and migrate it to the cloud simultaneously.

AK: How does the merger with Discovia reflect the changing nature of consolidation in the legal market?

BM: I think there's been a move towards scale. As clients have become more sophisticated and data types have become more complex, companies have recognized that the smaller, local e-discovery shops that were a big part of the industry five to ten years ago have struggled to keep up. There is more of a focus on data security and robustness that comes with larger organizations.

AK: Who ultimately benefits from the combination of teams like Lighthouse and Discovia?

BM: I think the clients benefit. They get access to a lot more talent and experience under one brand name, with the ability to handle end-to-end problems from the conceptualization of how to deal with their data to plans for managing their information throughout the process.

AK: How do you foresee the integration of these two cultures taking place?

BM: One of the benefits of this combination is that the cultures are very similar. The two companies are quality and client service focused. No integration is ever easy. This is the seventh acquisition I have done as a CEO (the first one at Lighthouse), and they all present challenges, so this one will be no different. I do think that the cultures are so similar that we will be able to get through the integration phase more quickly than most, and without as many bumps in the road as sometimes occur in the process.

AK: Where do you see the legal services and e-discovery market headed?

BM: I think legal departments are going to start really standardizing on Office 365 and tools that integrate well with Office 365 in an effort to manage data sitting in two places, both in the cloud and behind corporate firewalls.