Dive Brief:
- Ediscovery software provider Reveal has acquired two of its competitors, Logikcull and IPRO, creating a legal software company valued at $1 billion, Reveal says.
- The acquisitions could help Reveal, which can handle companies with large, complex data sets, appeal to a broader customer range by capturing Logikcull’s share of small and mid-sized customers and IPRO’s on-premises clients.
- “The acquisitions … build on Reveal's growth strategy of integrating the best and most useful technologies into one platform,” said Wendell Jisa, Reveal’s founder and CEO.
Dive Insight:
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the money to buy the two companies came from Reveal’s majority shareholder, K1 Investment Management.
“With this combination, legal professionals will only have to look to one company to solve all their ediscovery needs,” Tarun Jain, principal at K1, said.
The deal will give the company 4,000 customers in 12 countries, Reveal says.
Reveal launched in 2009 as a cloud-based discovery company that relies on artificial intelligence to help users sift through and manage large amounts of documents. IPRO has been around for almost 45 years as an on-premises discovery software company, and Logikcull launched in 2004 to provide discovery software to mainly small and mid-sized companies.
The companies will operate under the Reveal brand but Logikcull and IPRO products will keep their branding, Reuters reported.
In a report by The Wall Street Journal, Jain and Jisa called the deal a bet on the growing influence of digital tools and AI in particular on the legal industry, which has traditionally been slow to adopt technology.
“Attorneys have been behind the eight ball on technology,” Jisa told the Journal.
The ediscovery space is relatively crowded, with dozens of companies competing for customers among in-house legal teams, law firms and government agencies. Among the providers are Casepoint, Consilio, Epiq, Everlaw, Exterro, Level Legal and Relativity.
Reveal says the deal helps position it among a broad range of customer types.
“By bringing together the strengths of all three companies, including Logikcull’s intuitive, easy-to-use functionality and IPRO’s global reach and information governance tools, Reveal is now able to serve the diverse needs of clients across the legal spectrum, from SMB to mid-market and enterprise,” the company said in its announcement of the deal.
