OpenText has launched a dedicated legal technology function led by Serge Savchenko; who joins from Survalent Technology, where he was the chief revenue officer. The legal tech division becomes the only dedicated industry vertical in the Nasdaq-listed, 12,200-employee company, which today (10 July) announces its largest technology update to date, including significant advances in the security of its document management system eDOCS.
Savchenko started in July and will head a team that includes Simon Price, VP of sales, who was formerly managing director of Recommind. The team will look after the development of eDOCS and OpenText’s eDiscovery business (including EnCase, Axcelerate and OpenText Insight Predict, which stems from its acquisition of Catalyst).
As part of release 16 – which includes an expansion of OpenText’s enterprise information management cloud – additional layers of security are being added to eDOCS including document level encryption and activity monitoring to identify, escalate and triage potentially malicious threats to content. We’re aware of one leading US law firm who has already signed up.
The new release also sees OpenText embed AI functionality into its eDiscovery solutions to facilitate predictive filtering capabilities. Axcelerate learns from human decisions and identifies the patterns that are most likely to yield results. It identifies the most two-to-four word phrases in the data set and sorts them by occurrence.
These latest developments cumulatively signal major investment by a highly acquisitive corporation that has previously been criticised for running off the licensing fees of the company it acquires.
OpenText should be watched with interest particularly in light of the consolidation among larger legal technology vendors such as Intapp and their bid to become an integrated ‘one-stop-shop’ platform. Given the right strategy, focus and continued investment, OpenText’s existing technology stack – which includes enterprise content management; business process management and customer experience management – arguably makes it a serious platform contender.