Iridium Technology has turned out the strongest half-year revenue results in the firm’s history despite a widespread downturn in legal tech spend among law firms post COVID-19, we can reveal. It was a record year for all three of the company’s product families: Iridium BI, Intellistat, and Steere, which is said to reflect a recognition among law firms that in a tough economic environment, it is even more important to have strong business intelligence and financial analysis capabilities.
Iridium merged with BI technology and consulting services company Data Fusion Technologies (DFT) in 2019 but speaking to Legal IT Insider, Iridium’s founder and CEO Tom Jones said that the record numbers are as a result of comparing pre-merger figures, like for like. “It’s definitely a record half year across all three products, which I put down to two factors. Number one is that we now have 16 products not four, and that gives us an ability to cross sell. Number two is that while it may be seen as counter-intuitive, a lot of law firms, instead of pulling back on investment, are seeing that they need BI to manage towards profitability.”
He added: “Firms are coming to us and saying, ‘we don’t have good control of profitably and reporting’. That will come through BI and they are increasingly focused on collections, where our dashboard shows who they need to call today. It’s giving them that financial analysis capability across their different offices and businesses.”
Ten new clients signed up in the first six months of 2020, with wins in all three products. There were also numerous cross-sell wins, with existing clients who use modules in one product family signing up for modules in others.
Iridium, which is itself an entirely remote working company, has taken advantage of the revenue increase by investing back into product development, adding nine new developers since January 1. All three product families are under active development, and updated product roadmaps will be released shortly for all products in all three families.
Iridium took investment from Polaris Growth Fund two years ago – as we exclusively revealed at ILTA 2018 – and now has 70 employees. Polaris was able to get the funding to acquire DFT and Jones said: “Their insight has been tremendous.”