Mergers and Acquisitions

 

Today, corporate document management company Litera Microsystems announced it acquired fellow document manager Workshare for an undisclosed amount.

With this merger, Litera gains a data loss monitoring solution; a collaborative work space to track a deal's tasks; and an application that compares and reviews documents in various platforms. Workshare also notes on its site that its programs integrate into various e-discovery and data management platforms, including iManage, NetDocuments, Opentext and common corporate mainstays Microsoft Office and G-Suite.

Workshare will be fully integrated into Litera Microsystems by the end of the year, Litera confirmed in an email to Legaltech News.

Litera currently offers a Microsoft Word-integrated toolbar that tracks if a document meets a firm's preferred structure and wording, metadata management and other document management tools.

The deal marks Litera's first acquisition after being sold by K1 Investment Management to private equity investor HgCapital this May. HgCapital invested roughly £32.1 million ($39 million) into Litera after it acquired the tech company.

HgCapital not only bought the company recently, Litera also noted it leveraged HgCapital's network and knowledge of global legal tech to “drive this integration with Workshare,” according to the press release announcing the Litera-Workshare merger.

Workshare CEO Michael Garrett said he saw HgCapital's acquisition of Litera as an opportunity to join a growing team.

“We see this as a great opportunity to build on the strengths of each organization to better serve the market,” Garrett said in prepared remarks provided by Litera. “Litera Microsystems and Hg have impressed us with their vision of a single supplier to improve the efficiency, productivity and security of the document life cycle and we're looking forward to being part of that future.”

The impetus for the acquisition was the shared customers Litera and Workshare have and a growing trend toward end-to-end legal technology, the companies said.

“The legal industry has an increasing interest in finding end-to-end solutions rather than integrating and managing multiple products from multiple vendors,” said Litera Microsystems CEO Avaneesh Marwaha in the press release.

Litera Microsystems is familiar with bringing together multiple platforms—the company was created after K1 acquired and merged three separate companies, Litéra, Microsystems and The Sackett Group, for $100 million in 2017.

In HgCapital's May announcement regarding acquiring Litera, the company noted Litera was the sixth legal tech company HgCapital invested in, joining legal practice software company STP, enterprise legal management Mitratech and others.