It is quite literally the next chapter for the cloud-based bankruptcy platform NextChapter, as legal research company Fastcase today announces that it has acquired the Columbus, Ohio, company.
Launched in 2015 by Janine Sickmeyer, a former bankruptcy paralegal, NextChapter is a cloud platform for bankruptcy attorneys to prepare, manage and electronically file bankruptcy cases. Sickmeyer describes it as like TurboTax for bankruptcy cases.
In a phone call yesterday, Sickmeyer and Fastcase CEO Ed Walters told me that Fastcase is acquiring the company and all the staff, both onsite in Columbus and remote. They will retain their current office, which will become Fastcase’s Columbus office.
Sickmeyer will take on the titles of managing director and founder of NextChapter and director of practice workflow at Fastcase.
Fastcase is no stranger to bankruptcy products. In 2014, it entered into a deal with LexisNexis to acquire rights to Collier TopForm & File, a tool for creating and filing bankruptcy forms. After re-engineering that product, Fastcase relaunched it in 2018 as Fastcase BK. Earlier this year, Fastcase announced that it was partnering with the American Bankruptcy Institute to make ABI’s catalog of bankruptcy publications available on Fastcase.
Subscribers to the Fastcase BK product will now be moved to NextChapter, Walters said, describing it as the better product of the two. Those customers will see no change in their subscription pricing.
“We appreciate more than anyone how hard it is to put this [bankruptcy software] on the web,” Walters said. “We’ve always admired Janine’s approach to forms and to workflow, and her team has been the model for what a legal tech startup should be.”
Walters and Sickmeyer agreed that a significant aspect of this acquisition is the potential to expand the NextChapter form-automation technology into other form-driven areas of law, such as immigration and family law.
