Today document technology company Litera acquired Levit & James Inc.'s table of authorities (TOA) product Best Authority for an undisclosed amount. As Litera focuses on transaction work, Best Authority's features added instant TOA robustness without the need for extensive development in-house, the company said.

To be sure, Litera Desktop did have TOA features before the Best Authority acquisition. In fact, Litera purchased TOA software building startup CitationWare in 2011. Litera also offers a proofreading tool called Litigation Companion, which detects and codes citations written into a document and generates a TOA.

Litera CEO Avaneesh Marwaha said that Best Authority's TOA software would play an important part in litigation. "We recognized [Litigation Companion] wouldn't be as robust as the Best Authority offering," Marwaha said.

Best Authority provides customizable templates to automatically format a TOA and review scanned citations as a Microsoft Word plug-in. Litera plans to integrate Best Authority into its document drafting suite Litera Desktop, Marwaha said.

Discussing the transition for its customers, Marwaha noted that the new TOA features should feel "native" to Litera Desktop users. While he didn't provide details, Marwaha said there are additional functions the company looks to add to the TOA workflow and citations. 

When Litera releases its newly updated TOA features, it will compete with brief management tools equipped with TOA functions. Thomson Reuters' automated brief analyzer Quick Check, which was released in 2019, sorts the cases cited in a document for easier printing, emailing and downloading. Lexis Nexis also released Lexis for Microsoft Office, which included TOA features such as TOA hyperlink creation and edit tracing abilities.

However, Marwaha argued Litera would stick out from the competition because it's a full platform that also includes contract and clause comparisons and document analysis tools, which he said other platforms with TOA features aren't offering.

The Best Authority purchase is the latest addition in a growing line of Litera acquisitions. Business entity Litera Microsystems was formed through a $100 million merger between Litera, Microsystems and The Sackett Group in 2017. Litera later acquired fellow document manager Workshare in July 2019 and purchased transaction management software Doxly a month later.

While acquiring others, Litera has also expanded its tech offerings. Notably, it released Clause Companion, a Microsoft Word-integrated tool that stores and retrieves contract clauses within document workflow in 2018.

Levit & James also has an extensive history in developing tech solutions for lawyers with its 1998 release of CrossWords, a tool that converts WordPerfect files to Microsoft Word. 

Since Best Authority's release in 2006 it's updated the plug-in over the years, including a 2015 Best Authority Version 4 release that had an enhanced "replace text" function, simplified TOA formatting and Microsoft Windows 10 and Office 2016 support.