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Integreon this week announced the first of a series of changes to litigation management platform Allegory Law aimed at corporate counsel. The changes come just three months after e-discovery company Integreon acquired the software.

Allegory Law, founded in 2011 by former litigator Alma Asay, was initially focused on helping litigators collaborate and manage evidence across large teams within law firms. Integreon CEO Bob Rowe wants to expand that information out to managing in-house teams.

“It very quickly became apparent that we needed to expand beyond law firms and legal teams. The best way to explain that is how things are currently done,” Rowe said. Most discovery work product these days, he said, is distributed across a number of different platforms, making it difficult to track progress and content in discovery from start to finish.

What's more, Rowe noted, is that law firms aren't the only ones who need to track that progress. In-house counsel, often charged with overseeing a number of different cases at once, need to get a bird's eye view of the litigation they manage. To that end, Allegory's evidence management platform now includes a corporate counsel-facing dashboard for case information for individual or multiple matters.

Asay in a statement described the new platform updates as “the first step toward a completely new user interface.” Rowe noted that Asay and the Allegory team had already begun work on these interface changes prior to acqusition, mostly in response to user feedback collected by the company in recent years.

“When you put it in the aggregate, it does start sounding like an overhaul of the system, but it's really just feedback from our users,” he said.

Allegory's pivot towards corporate counsel helps the company avoid the pitfalls of the notoriously slow law firm sales cycle. Although Rowe said that Allegory's platform will continue developing its platform for law firm litigation management, the company is looking to shift its target audience more toward in-house counsel.

“I much prefer go to the corporation and have them partner with us and go to the law firm and say 'Hey, take a look at this,'” Rowe said, adding that law firms can have a harder time with selling their in-house clients on new technology than the other way around.

Rowe also thinks the pivot could push law firms to rethink their current vendor onboarding cycles. “There is an underlying strategy from us on how do we shorten the sales cycles,” he said.

Ultimately, Rowe hopes Allegory can help legal users oversee the discovery process from start to finish. In the long run, he said, “We don't want to be the e-discovery partner for the corporation but the discovery partner. It certainly extends well beyond e-discovery, into discovery and into trial. We want one repository.”

That one repository, Rowe believes, can help organizations track their litigation and data over years. “The institutional knowledge leaves, the people. By having one repository for all this evidence and work product, people can come and go, but the company has one place to look,” he said.