As I wrote here earlier, Litera yesterday announced that it has acquired Doxly, a four-year-old company founded by a former biglaw partner to manage the legal transactions process. I have just had a phone call with the CEOs of the two companies and can provide more details.
First, to sum up the news. the document technology company Litera Microsystems has acquired Doxly, a platform designed to manage the transaction-closing process from end to end. The significance of this acquisition is enhanced by the fact that, just last month, Litera acquired U.K. company Workshare, which has its own transaction platform called Workshare Transact.
In the space of roughly a month, that means, Litera has gone from having no transaction-management technology to having two of the leading platforms — and platforms that span both the U.S. and European markets. By so doing, Litera has positioned itself as a leader in the transaction management space — and some might argue the leader.
Litera has been a company to watch in recent years, particularly since 2017, when a $100 million investment combined Litera with three other leading document technologies: Microsystems, XRef and The Sackett Group. Then, last May, Litera was sold to Hg Capital Trust Plc.
As for Doxly, it was founded in 2016 by Haley Altman, a former corporate lawyer with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in San Francisco and Ice Miller in Indianapolis, and her Ice Miller colleague Elizabeth Brier. The same year, they raised $2.2 million in seed funding. In 2017, Doxly was a participant in the first-ever ABA Techshow startup pitch competition (of which I was an organizer and moderator).
Last year, with Altman remaining CEO, Doxly brought on a new executive chairman, Christopher Clapp, who is an expert in leading companies to exits. At the time, I asked them if that meant the company was positioning itself for an acquisition.
