On Tuesday, legal research platform Fastcase announced it had acquired NextChapter, a cloud-based software for preparing complex bankruptcy forms and filing them in court.

NextChapter will replace Fastcase BK, the company's existing solution for filing bankruptcy petitions, which was originally acquired from LexisNexis under the name Collier's Top Form & File.

Ed Walters, Fastcase's CEO, said that users were looking for a more complete suite of applications. "One of the central things that they are asking for is a forms and workflow tool," Walters said.

Instead of attempting to build a tool from scratch that could rival NextChapter, Walters said that an acquisition was determined to be the most prudent course of action. The company also has plans to eventually expand the solution beyond just bankruptcy and into other complex practice areas like immigration or family law.

Fastcase BK subscribers will be transitioned to NextChapter, a process that had already begun as of Tuesday and is expected to take several weeks.

On the corporate side, NextChapter founder Janine Sickmeyer will serve as the company's managing director in addition to acting as Fastcase's director of practice workflow. Additionally, NextChapter's headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, will become Fastcase's second office location.

Sickmeyer thinks that the acquisition by Fastcase came along at the right time in the company's growth cycle.

"We're looking at form-heavy, easily adaptable markets that we can really help the user," Sickmeyer said.

The acquisition tops off a busy few years for Fastcase, which have seen the company mostly focused on putting its trove of research data to work and potentially courting a customer base of young attorneys in the process.

In January 2018, Fastcase acquired Docket Alarm in an effort to combine the company's analytics suite with its own database of judicial opinion data.

The commitment to analytics was reaffirmed later that year when Fastcase introduced its "AI Sandbox" a secure virtual platform that allows law firms to mine their data for insights using cloud-based analytics tools by the likes of Neota Logic, IBM Watson, LexPredict and Contraxsuite.

While NextChapter doesn't offer much in the way of analytics, its focus is on efficiency. The solution offers features such as client texting, a PACER notices inbox and virtual paralegal services.

Together with Docket Alarm and Fastcase's research platform, NextChapter feeds into the creation of what Walters terms a "productivity suite for law firms."

That suite would potentially include a common calendar with deadlines or alerts from Docket Alarm, Next Chapter and Fastcase legal research compiled in one location.

"I really do think that the overlocking, connected applications are going to be the lawyer's desk of the future and Next Chapter is going to be a very important part of that," Walters said.

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