Photo: Shutterstock

 

“I'll be completely honest, when I was first asked to look at it as part of the due diligence process, I went in with a preconceived notion,” said Stephen Stewart, chief technology officer at Nuix.

It's a common refrain, and one I've heard about many legal technologies that are considered “legacy” in this still-emerging market. Ringtail released its version 9.5 in July; among some e-discovery observers, that might as well make it from somewhere in the Mesozoic Age.

But that's not where the story ends, not this time. Stewart continued, “Upon seeing it, I was like, 'Holy cow! This is not anything like what I expected.' This is a modern, awesome interface with great analytics, and truth be told, it has every feature I've ever been asked for on an RFP.”

Earlier this week, Nuix announced it had acquired FTI Consulting's Ringtail e-discovery business for $55 million, one of the largest acquisitions in a year of e-discovery M&A. As part of the deal, the Ringtail software came under Nuix's purview, as did FTI's Ringtail-specific employees and customers. Customers that had been with FTI first, meanwhile, stayed with the company, though with the continued option to license the software through Nuix.

Now, it falls to Nuix to try and promote the software through what Stewart called the “Nuix megaphone.” He said the early response from Nuix customers has been positive, but the company's looking to expand the technology's reach through a now-unified platform.

“People had written it off because they wouldn't buy from a competitor, or because quite frankly they had a dated view of what Ringtail was,” Stewart said. “That's just a huge mistake: Ringtail's a fantastic platform with amazing analytics.”

The competitor piece is one that can't be ignored. Although Ringtail was a largely autonomous unit within the larger FTI Consulting umbrella, the FTI association made reselling it a nonstarter for many competing legal technology advisory services. Now that the association has changed, Stewart said, he's already received calls from partners who sell Nuix and now are looking at including Ringtail in the package. And that's building off a large pre-existing customer base—Stewart noted that “FTI will be our biggest retail customer coming out of this. … FTI still has a huge Ringtail install that they will be using to service their customers.”

So what's the end goal for Nuix? E-discovery is a crowded marketplace, albeit one with an ever-growing $10 billion-plus industry valuation. Nuix is hoping to leverage Ringtail's analytics in particular as a market differentiator, both for e-discovery work and “across the entire spectrum of data that Nuix deals with,” including security, user behavior and more. While those analytics may have been cost-prohibitive or simply too difficult to parse in the past, “the simplicity of being able to use analytics on every matter, regardless of size or scale, really brings analytics to everybody, which is one of our key desires,” Stewart said.

And especially for e-discovery software providers such as Nuix, there is business to be gained with market differentiators. Although Stewart wouldn't say the name Relativity outright, it's clear that's where Nuix is aiming with the acquisition. “When you look at the review market space, there is a clear and incumbent technology that has a huge percentage of the marketplace,” he explained. “And in order to catch up, we are incredibly fortunate to basically come out of the gate and effectively acquire their peer, if not their superior when it comes to in-built analytics.”