Cloud computing 

On Tuesday, desktop-based legal practice management software company Tabs3 Software announced it acquired cloud-based practice management provider CosmoLex in a bid to expand its cloud offerings. As part of the acquisition, CosmoLex will still be available as a stand-alone platform.

Dan Berlin, president and CEO of Tabs3, explained the impetus behind the acquisition was the need for Tabs3 to “have a full-featured cloud product for solo and small to midsized law firms.”

He added, “As the cloud market has become embraced by the legal community probably over the last five to seven years, we realized we need to have product in that market segment.”

To be sure, while Lincoln, Nebraska-based Tabs3 primarily offers desktop-based practice management software, in 2017 it launched a cloud billing service Kurent, for small and solo law firms.

Berlin noted that Kurent will be one of three sets of products Tabs3 now offers, including the “Tabs3 software suite, which is very much legacy software that has been around a long time,” and the CosmoLex platform.

Per terms of the acquisition, Rick Kabra, president of CosmoLex will stay on as head of the CosmoLex division within Tabs3. Berlin said there are no immediate plans to integrate CosmoLex into other products, “because all of our products run independently and we serve different parts of the market.”

Kabra noted that CosmoLex was excited about the acquisition because it helped expand and round out its service offerings. “For lack of a better word, we had what [Tabs3] did not have and they had what we did not have.”

He added that Tabs3 will be now more of a competitor in the legal tech market because “we have a solution for every type of law firm from solo to midsize market.”

Tabs3 joins a growing number of legal tech companies that have expanded their cloud services through acquisitions in 2018. In January, AbacusNext acquired CPA software provider Commercial Logic to expand its cloud services to the accounting industry, while in April, Catalyst acquired cloud-based e-discovery provider TotalDiscovery.

In June, cloud data protection and management company Druva also bought Ireland-based cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions company CloudRanger.

This year has also seen one instance of a cloud-based legal tech company expanding its on-premise business, with cloud-based e-discovery provider Cloudnine acquiring the on-premise LexisNexis eDiscovery product suite in March.