Two years ago, Mitratech CEO Jason Parkman and ThinkSmart CEO Paul Hirner met at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) annual institute. The two company heads saw a natural fit between in-house legal and compliance group Mitratech's TeamConnect platform and workflow automation tool ThinkSmart Automation Platform (TAP), and decided to establish a partnership agreement.

After 24 months of partnering, Mitratech this morning announced it would formally acquire ThinkSmart, making the two companies' relationship “more of a marriage,” Parkman said. The acquisition will see both technologies integrated into Mitratech's TeamConnect platform to provide what both companies believe will be the broadest end-to-end legal operations platform.

Parkman said he saw a large uptick in Mitratech clients interested in pursuing joint possibilities with ThinkSmart. “We've been pulled into more customer conversations and prospect conversations than we could've anticipated when we first started looking at a partnership,” Parkman noted.

That increase seems to parallel industry interest in legal operations as a whole. CLOC's membership has ballooned in roughly the same time frame from just a handful of members to thousands.

Hirner noted that the spike in interest in legal operations reflects a broader industry trend toward streamlined processes, which can help companies keep budgets low. “What we've seen over the last while in the market, especially in legal, a definite movement toward optimization and creating efficiency across the whole organization,” he noted.

ThinkSmart's TAP system can be a “natural first step” for a lot of organizations, Hirner said, to begin thinking about how to improve operational processes. Parkman, conversely, finds that Mitratech's TAP users are looking for automation to help complete “the last mile” toward operational efficiency. “These are many clients who've had great success with legal operations management with TeamConnect. Now they're starting to look at things like how they impact the rest of the organization,” he said.

Parkman said Mitratech is working to bring together the two companies and products without disrupting customer service lines for existing ThinkSmart clients, and will be expanding on integrations between TeamConnect and TAP that the two companies had previously worked on throughout their partnership.

This acquisition follows an announcement last year that private equity group HgCapital would make a majority investment in Mitratech. The company in recent years has also acquired a slew of smaller companies, including U.K.-based HiTec Laboratories, CMO Software, Viewabill, CaseTrack, Bridgeway Software and LT Online Corp.

Nevertheless, Parkman said the ThinkSmart acquisition is most likely to help the company expand its reach across the full breadth of legal operations work. “This is probably the most strategic acquisition that we've done,” Parkman said.