Litera has acquired Best Authority vendor Levit & James and will use the Best Authority Table of Authorities (TOA) within its Litigation Companion proofreading tool, as it focuses its attention on further simplifying drafting within the contentious sector.
Litigation Companion has its own TOA but Best Authority is widely recognized as the market leading tool and this acquisition was driven in part by requests from Litera’s customers.
Best Authority automatically finds and marks all the legal citations in a brief and generates a TOA in seconds.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Litera’s CEO Avaneesh Marwaha said: “We’re excited for the Litera Desktop. This is a pretty important piece for litigation and it really rounds out our offering. A lot of customers have suggested buying this and we did our own due diligence. It was clear from the market perspective and our own that it made sense. There is always a question over whether you build or buy but Best Authority is the gold standard for tables of authority.”
He adds in a statement out today (26 March): “In a debate over best of breed v. platform, we believe building a best of breed platform is essential.”
Litera, which is owned by Hg, has traditionally heavily promoted and built up its transactional drafting capability but you can expect to see more emphasis on its contentious capability going forward as it promotes ‘the full suite’.
Ian Levit, vice president of Levit & James said, “We’re delighted to be joining the Litera family. We’re excited by their vision to create a supplier which supports the full workflow for both litigators and transactional lawyers. With so many shared customers we’re confident their reaction will be extremely positive.”