Well it’s been another one of those weeks when we can’t move for legal tech announcements and here are a handful of the good ones in brief, including the strategic alliance between Norton Rose Fulbright and Syke; CM Group’s acquisition of Vuture; and Motta Fernandes Advogados selection of NetDocuments; while in eDiscovery land JND eDiscovery has attained RelativityOne Silver partner status and Hanzo is launching Hanzo Hold for Slack data management.
Norton Rose Fulbright and Syke Legal Engineering form strategic alliance
Norton Rose Fulbright and market-leading legal technology company Syke Legal Engineering have formed NRF Syke: a strategic alliance to offer clients combined legal advice and document automation services.
Syke helps corporate legal teams and law firms across the world to buy and implement legal technology, with a focus on document automation.
NRF Syke will offer over 30 document automators, including a high concentration of some of the world’s most experienced practitioners. These automators will work closely with lawyers across Norton Rose Fulbright.
The new alliance complements NRF Transform, Norton Rose Fulbright’s global change and innovation program. NRF Transform aims to change how the firm helps clients solve problems, leveraging people, process and technology.
Partner Martin McCann, Norton Rose Fulbright’s global head of business and global sponsor of NRF Transform, commented: “Law departments that effectively leverage contract automation are seeing significant benefits. What often begins as an efficiency or cost saving exercise can lead to improved risk control, business information visibility and internal user experience, and a base to build other legal tech initiatives and tools. Document automation is a rapidly developing market in which there is an acute skills shortage, and in which both Syke and Norton Rose Fulbright are leading providers.”
Alistair Maiden, founder and CEO of Syke Legal Engineering, said: “We began working with Norton Rose Fulbright on an individual mandate when we realised we could do things for the client together which we couldn’t do alone. We quickly reached the joint conclusion that if we worked together more closely, we could take something to clients that would be a genuine step change on what client could otherwise access.”
CM Group acquires Vuture
Vuture has been acquired by CM Group — a family of marketing technology companies including Campaign Monitor, Delivra, Emma, Liveclicker and Sailthru.
Vuture’s platform includes email marketing and automation, offering technology for event management, content management, payments, alumni tracking, and surveys. It counts as customers around 65% of the UK’s top 100 law firms and more than half of the magic circle. It customers include Howard Kennedy, Savills, and Akin Gump.
In conjunction with the acquisition, CM Group completed a $410 million financing, providing capital for future acquisitions to accelerate growth and provide a technology solution to meet the needs of every marketer.
“At CM Group, we are on a mission to build a portfolio of customer-focused email and multichannel technologies,” said Wellford Dillard, CEO of CM Group. “This mission is driven by the fact that there are over 7,000 martech companies in the space today, making it nearly impossible for marketers to navigate the technology buying process with confidence. CM Group’s portfolio approach allows us to work collaboratively with marketers to match them with the right platform based on their specific needs.”
Read more about Vuture in our BD Tech Report here: https://legaltechnology.com//legal-it-insider-bd-tech-report-2018/
Motta Fernandes Advogados selects NetDocuments
Motta Fernandes Advogados, a leading full-service law firm in Brazil and member of the Latin Lawyer 250, has chosen NetDocuments as its cloud-based document and email management platform.
Servicing domestic and international clients as a part of the trusted TerraLex network and International Bar Association (IBA) -, the firm’s switch to NetDocuments is said to have been the key piece of its cloud technology and security strategy. The new strategy was put in place to ensure data protection, information governance, and continued exceptional service for their clients.
“NetDocuments’ platform is integral to ensuring our professionals have the tools they need, our clients receive excellent service, and our data is secure, compliant, and available anywhere and on any device,” said John Shaw, administrative and finance director at Motta Fernandes. “The platform will help us deliver on our goals to improve the client experience, properly protect our data, and ensure our people have the most modern technology available in the market today.”
NetDocuments says it saw a 126 percent increase in adoption of NetDocuments across Latin America in the first quarter of 2019 compared to the entire 2018 calendar year. The growth has come from new customers across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Puerto Rico.
JND eDiscovery achieves RelativityOne Silver partner status
JND eDiscovery, a division of JND Legal Administration has achieved RelativityOne Silver Partner with eDiscovery software provider, Relativity. A RelativityOne Certified Partner since 2017, JND is now one of only three service providers in the world to satisfy the performance and volume-based criteria set forth by Relativity for its new and most prestigious certified partner level.
“Our partnership with Relativity has been integral to our ascent in the industry,” said Scott Lombard, senior vice president of JND eDiscovery. “JND is proud to be one of three distinguished service providers that meets the stringent standards required to be a RelativityOne Silver Partner.”
Hanzo Hold brings a lean approach to Slack data management
And innovative compliance and eDiscovery vendor Hanzo has launched Hanzo Hold to bring a lean approach to Slack data management.
Hanzo Hold enables organizations to apply a legal hold to enterprise Slack data and to adhere to data retention policies while meeting the duty to preserve data for litigation and compliance use cases.
“We’ve partnered with Slack to extend the power of our integration and to connect Slack Enterprise Grid customers with unique and innovative avenues to address their specific information governance and eDiscovery needs,” said James Murphy, VP of Product, Hanzo. “Hanzo’s legal hold solution for Slack gives legal teams the precise control necessary to preserve data that is subject to legal hold and mitigate the risk of retaining unnecessary data.”
With the integration, Slack Enterprise Grid customers can use Hanzo Hold to control their Slack eDiscovery and respond to eDiscovery and audit requests.