iManage last week announced it has acquired risk and matter management technology provider Elegrity in a push to further evolve its product portfolio and core business. The acquisition comes a little over a year after iManage also purchased artificial intelligence systems provider RAVN.

With these two major successive acquisitions, iManage has significantly expanded its purview into risk and matter management. Or as Dan Carmel, chief marketing officer at iManage, put it, “I think we've moved well beyond document management.”

Carmel noted that as part of the acquisition, iManage “intends to fully integrate Elegrity's product offerings with its own technology over the next few months.” It will also slowly fold the Elegrity brand, including its website, into the company, and all of Elegrity's staff will continue working for iManage.

Joy Spicer, the CEO of Elegrity, will now be the head of a new business unit serving Elegrity clients within iManage. She said she was excited about the acquisition because of the opportunity to integrate Elegrity's offerings with RAVN's AI technology. “We are interested in how we can leverage the AI into some of our processes, especially around conflict of interests, which is a very labor-intensive process,” she said.

To be sure, iManage's move to grow its core business beyond document management started well before it acquired Elegrity. “iManage has significantly expanded its product footprint over the last two years in two vectors,” Carmel said.

First, the company moved into the data protection sector with the release of two new cybersecurity products, Threat Manager and Security Policy Manager. Following that, iManage acquired RAVN to enable its products with risk management capabilities. Carmel noted that RAVN's AI technology is integrated into its document management products to help customers “analyze whether information contained in their documents may contain personally identifiable information” or other sensitive information.

With the acquisition of Elegrity, iManage expects to “become a single vendor that can now provide a governance solution that really for the first time spans matter inception through the finishing and closing of the matter and finally disposition and records management,” Carmel said.

He added the move to become a one-stop shop for all document and risk governance demands was in part fueled by legal customers' demand for a more comprehensive service.

Beyond acquisitions, iManage has also expanded its footprint through a slew of product integration partnerships. The company has entered into at least 150 partnerships with legal tech companies, including Prosperoware and Doxly and, most recently, cloud document automation software provider Templafy.

iManage is hardly the only legal tech company moving toward more comprehensive services. Many legal customers desire to use one solution for many of their needs, a shift that has also reshaped the e-discovery market, with many companies looking to partnerships and acquisitions to broaden the scope of their offerings.