May has been the month of M&A in e-discovery. It started off with a bang, with Morae Legal and e-discovery provider Clutch Group announcing that the two companies would be merging. Soon after, Xact Data Discovery revealed it was acquiring F1 Discovery, Lighthouse eDiscovery announced it was acquiring fellow discovery company Discovia, and Advanced Discovery acquired fellow discovery company Altep. And that’s not even counting new investments, like Zapproved announced during the month.
These deals have resulted in not only questions from customers about how technologies will change and integrate, but also from company employees about their new roles in a combined enterprise. And few people know about these questions more than Pete Smith—during his years in legal technology at companies like Xerox, Quorum, First Advantage/Consilio, TechLaw/UBIC and others, Smith has worked on the business development side of more than a dozen acquisitions.