business merger

The race to gobble up midmarket e-discovery companies continues, and this time around, a company that has largely watched M&A activity from the sidelines is getting involved.

On April 10, Catalyst announced it had purchased a majority interest in TotalDiscovery, an e-discovery software provider that specializes in legal hold and data collection software. The deal will primarily be used to expand Catalyst's core offering to provide an integrated program, Insight Discovery, that spans the EDRM from legal hold and identification through collection, processing, search, analytics, review and production.

Financial details for the transaction have not been announced. As reported last week, Catalyst is funded by FTV Global, while TotalDiscovery was previously privately owned.

That expansion to the full EDRM was the major impetus behind the deal, Catalyst CEO John Barr told Legaltech News in a conversation shortly after the deal was announced. He noted that now, Catalyst will be able to offer collection, processing and analytics in a real-time, simultaneous manner.

“Our clients have typically come [to] us for review and analytics technology and services, and many of those organizations would prefer a single vendor and platform to cover as much of the EDRM as possible to lower costs, lower data security risks, lower those inefficient processes that are associated with using disparate products and systems,” he explained. “So by adding legal hold and collection technology, we now offer a full EDRM with a single platform.”

Barr added that this sort of one-stop-shop solution is something that clients, particularly on the corporate side, have been asking for.

“From our perspective, a vendor that can provide a holistic solution to a corporate client or their law firms is really what our clients want—the ability to provide not only the technology but the suite of services on top of that they really need. … When we have been most successful with larger corporations, that's what we've provided them,” Barr said.

According to a press release from Catalyst, current TotalDiscovery customers and channel partners shouldn't expect many immediate changes. TotalDiscovery will “continue to service its clients directly and through its reseller network,” the release said, as well as “offer its full set of features and API” to those it currently works with.

To that end, TotalDiscovery is continuing with its separate branding, Barr confirmed. The company's website already features a logo with the phrase: “TotalDiscovery: A Catalyst Company.”

Catalyst and TotalDiscovery are certainly familiar with one another. The two companies teamed up last fall to release Legal Hold and Collection, an add-on to Catalyst's Insight Enterprise platform. At the time, Catalyst chief technology officer Larry Barela told Legaltech News that the company had chosen TotalDiscovery for the partnership because “[t]hey were the best at what we were looking for. They are a cloud-based technology, they have an API we can write to, it's a small footprint from the installation side, and it's a very powerful application, but it's simple.”

Barr added to LTN, “It helps when you know the guys on the other end of the table and they know you. Everybody knew this was a good idea. … It felt more like two teams getting together than an acquisition.”

Major e-discovery consolidation has been rampant as we move into Q2 2018. The past few weeks have seen two major e-discovery M&A deals, with Consilio and Advanced Discovery joining forces, CloudNine taking over LexisNexis' e-discovery portfolio, and Lighthouse acquiring Swiss chat discovery group Forexus.

While Barr did not say that Catalyst will be making more deals in the future, he did note that M&A is one area of growth his team considers when expanding its product offering. In this case, he said, “It was really about filling in the gaps and knowing this was a great solution for that, and accelerating that time to market. We don't have to build everything, but we also don't have to acquire everything—it was the right mix of ingredients.”

And with the e-discovery market moving quickly, there will be more potential for growth. At the end of his conversation with Legaltech News, Barr added, “There's a real opportunity in front of us, and we're really excited about it. We're pursuing it with all of our vigor and all of our energy right now.”