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During ILTACON 2018, information management software provider OpenText announced it has streamlined how it develops and sells its legal products in a bid to offer clients a more comprehensive “one-stop-shop” suite of legal tools.

As part of the new focus, the company also launched a cloud-based process management tool called Legal Center.

The new approach means OpenText product teams that sell and manage the eDOCS, Axcelerate, EnCase and Decisiv platforms will work closer together and consolidate how all platforms are sold to legal clients.

Adam Kuhn, senior product marketing manager of discovery at OpenText, explained that while previously clients would go to different representatives to purchase each platform, “now they have one point of contact.”

Kuhn added that the change at OpenText is “not a restructuring, but a refined focus on the legal… and a reflection of the company's desires to not only serve the legal market, but invest in legal solutions.”

Part of the impetus for the new focus, Kuhn said, was a realization that OpenText has “a lot of products in the portfolio, and we found that there were a lot of products serving the legal market specifically not under a unified legal leadership.”

In addition to integrating its legal products and teams, OpenText also launched Legal Center to help attorneys with project and process management.

Larry Roy, senior director of product management at OpenText, said the tool will offer plans that describe all the steps certain practice groups need to go through when handling specific types of matters. While some templated plans will come with the tool, “law firms will be able to define their own steps when dealing with a matter for a specific practice group,” he said.

Legal Center, however, is not the only new addition to OpenText's legal products suite. As part of its move to break down barriers between its legal products, the company has also integrated the search engine behind the Recommind e-discovery and analytics platform into eDocs.  OpenText acquired Recocmmind in June 2016.

It is likely that OpenText's new focus is a move to better integrate the technology and teams it has acquired from other e-discovery companies in the past. In addition to buying Recommind, OpenText also purchased Dell EMC's Enterprise Content Division in September 2016 and  acquired Guidance Software in August 2017.

When asked how OpenText intends to compete with other e-discovery and information management companies that also aim to offer a “one-stop-shop” suite of legal tools, such as Catalyst and ZL Technologies, Roy said OpenText's technology, specifically its AI around search, was a key differentiator. “We went from search, to more conceptual searching, to then leveraging the search functionality to give you more predictive results,” he said.