When document review software provider Ringtail announced a partnership with Seal Legal Forensics, a managed legal services and e-discovery company in Chile, it was the start of a few new beginnings.

For one, it was the launch a new strategy by Ringtail to pursue a path separate from its owner FTI Consulting and into a South American legal market. It was also a vindication that the e-discovery market in South America has started to mature in its own right.

Bill Adams, senior managing director at FTI Consulting and head of the Ringtail business, noted that Ringtail became acquainted with Seal through its co-founder, Alejandra Vallejos, a partner in a Chilean law firm that worked with FTI Consulting.

Seal had approached Ringtail directly about being a technology provider at just the time Ringtail was looking to start its own independent engagement. Seal's offer “dovetailed a bit with a change of strategy with Ringtail within FTI,” Adams said. FTI realized that for Ringtail “to do well, it needed to take a different approach to the market. … It needed to not just rely on engagements that FTI was hired to do.”

Traditionally, “large e-discovery service providers take Ringtail software, install it on their environment” and use it for client tasks, Adams said. Ringtail's new partnership with Seal, however, allowed the managed services company to not only use the Ringtail to serve client needs, but also sell the software directly to clients as well.

For Seal, which launched in 2016, the decision to partner with Ringtail was mainly based on the experience it had with FTI in the past. “We had a pretty fluent relationship with FTI, so everything went smooth for us in the beginning. And that was the main reason to stick with Ringtail,” Vallejos noted.

Seal has a unique place in the South American legal market by being not only the first and so far only legal company licensing and using Ringtail, but also the first locally grown e-discovery company in Chile.

Sander van der Voorde, co-founder of Seal, noted that though companies like FTI and Deloitte offered legal services in Chile before Seal, they operated out of other countries instead of being wholly headquartered within Chile.

While Chile and other South American countries don't have discovery obligations in litigation than the U.S., “there is an increasing need for these kinds of [e-discovery] services… since government authorities are stepping up and increasing investigations,” Van der Voorde said.

Seal, for instance, “specializes in providing services for law firm, corporations and government” entities dealing with antitrust and corporate fraud investigations, he said.

While currently focused on the local market, Seal is also eyeing other South American countries where there is a strong demand for e-discovery services and technology. “We are planning to expand, and basically are focusing on the countries where the legal services are more or less at the same level of development as Chile, so that's Columbia, Argentina and maybe also Peru.”

Whether Seal and others operating across the continent will face completion from more locally grown legal managed services companies in the near future remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: it's a growing market.