“I’m not a big fan of dabbling in things,” Avaneesh Marwaha, the chief executive officer of legal technology company Litera, told me during an interview last week. “If we enter into an area, we want to become the market leader.”
That statement pretty well sums up the company’s news of the past two weeks, announcements issued just before and during ILTA>ON, the first-ever virtual annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association.
As I reported here on Friday, Aug. 21, just ahead of the conference, Litera announced that it had acquired Allegory Law, the litigation management platform founded in 2012 by former Gibson Dunn litigator Alma Asay and more recently owned by Integreon.
The following Monday, as ILTA>ON kicked off, Litera built on that acquisition news with its announcement of the launch of Litera Litigate. Litigate is a workflow and collaboration platform that takes the capabilities of Allegory, combines them with Litera’s own Litigation Companion and the recently acquired Best Authority, and extends them through drafting, case management, and binders for litigators.
The next day, Litera unveiled Litera Transact. This is the culmination of its acquisitions last year of two leading deal management platforms, Doxly and Workshare Transact. Litera Transact combines those two products into a single platform for managing deals.
Along with these announcements, Litera introduced a new umbrella name for its various offerings, Litera Work, which it describes as an ecosystem made up of its workspaces in Litera Transact and Litera Litigate, and its drafting workflow products in Litera Desktop.
Further extending its week of news, the company announced on Aug. 26 that it has seen year-over-year growth of 50% and that Litera Desktop had broken the 70,000-user mark with its selection by the Global 100 firm Troutman Pepper. The product is in use at more than 95% of Global 100 firms, Litera said.
It also said that Am Law 200 firm Smith, Gambrell & Russell had which moved to the full version of Litera Transact after taking the company up on its offer of free access to a lite version.
Evolution of Workflows
When I discussed all this with Marwaha in our interview last week, his message was to stay tuned for even more news in the coming months, as the company pursues its vision of creating an ecosystem that unifies all aspects of content creation and matter generation within a law firm.
With regard to the Allegory acquisition and the launch of Litera Litigate, Marwaha said that the company had seen litigation as a an area that could greatly benefit from advancements in technology and integration. The company considered building a litigation management platform, but when Allegory became available, “it was a no-brainer to buy it,” he said.
The company will move fast on further developing the product, Marwaha said, and will have more announcements around case management in the coming months.
With regard to Litera Transact, Marwaha said that last week’s release is the culmination of the integration of Doxly and Workshare Transact, and marks the official end of the Doxly-branded product. He said that the platform has been a success both for the company and its customers, with it currently being used for some major market deals.
Looking ahead, Marwaha said the company is working aggressively to make all its desktop applications web ready, with the goal of making all its technology so interoperable that users can work anywhere.
Much of the current focus of that development is on Microsoft Teams. In the near future, Litera Transact users will be able to work on deals from within Teams, with deal checklists and documents available there.
Litera Litigate will also be more tightly integrated with Teams, Marwaha said.
“We see the evolution of work and workflows happening,” Marwaha said, “and there is a lot more we can do in this space.”
[Full Disclosure: Litera pays me a fee to host programming on its Litera.TV.]
