Vin Murria gone from CSG/IRIS group

We’ve been trying to get an official statement all day – hence this late posting – but this is the story so far… Vin Murria, the controversial chief executive of the CS Group – and more recently the M&A Officer for the IRIS Group which acquired CSG last month – has gone. She apparently finalised negotiations on her departure package late last night (3rd July). So what happens next? David England, previously with CSG’s Legal Division and before that Solution 6, becomes chief executive of the IRIS Group’s not-for-profit and business solutions division, while a new person (believed to be Arlene Adams, previously with Valista and before that Sun Microsystems) has been recruited to take over as chief executive of the compliance & legal division (which includes AIM, Laserform, Mountain and Videss) on the 9th July.Despite plenty of rumours to the contrary, Ian Knox remains as a director of the Mountain group – he told us earlier today that he is “too young to retire” – as does his co-director at Mountain Steve Kendrick. (The word on the street is CSG acquired Mountain for around £9m.) And, Barbara Firth, previously the FD of CSG, now holds a senior M&A post within the IRIS Group.As soon as we have a formal statement from IRIS, we will publish it but in the meantime the immediate reaction seems to have been a mixture of sadness, particular at one legal IT supplier that thought it was going to be acquired for £6m by Vin Murria later this summer, and jubilation, with the MD of another company on the phone to us singing a certain cruel line of a song from The Wizard of Oz. (OK, it was “ding, dong, the witch is dead”.) We’ve also had a couple of people say they hope they don’t win a Supplier Personality of the Year Award at next year’s Legal Technology Awards (nothing to do with The Orange Rag) as Vin Murria only lasted a little over 5 months after she received it earlier this year. (Perhaps they’ll rename it the “I’m Out of Here Award” – Simon Price won it the previous year and promptly left Aderant to join Recommind.)Seriously, the woman may have scared the living daylights out of much of the UK legal IT industry but she deserves credit for having done more to change its structure in 12 months than anyone else managed over the previous 24 years and we wish her well for the future. As to how the industry now pans out, well that remains to be seen.