Intapp has signed an agreement to acquire Belfast-headquartered cloud content management systems provider Repstor, extending its platform for the first time to encompass the fee-earner work product. Repstor has a strong partnership with Microsoft and helps firms to get the most out of their Microsoft 365 investments, including SharePoint and Teams.
Co-founded by director of legal solutions Sheila Gormley, Repstor started out life enabling legal organisations to leverage Microsoft 365 and SharePoint for case, document and email management. More recently, it is has also built out native Microsoft 365 solution Repstor for Teams, which is helping law firms and corporates to provision their content in Teams. The use of Teams has exploded thanks to the pandemic, but native Microsoft functionality doesn’t help with law firms’ document storage, information governance, and records management requirements.
During a webinar with Legal IT Insider, Gormley pointed out: “Teams is so easy to use and so powerful that everyone starts using it, and then suddenly you have a lot of Teams sprawl, so the beauty of it is also part of the problem. People start using it really quickly, and then your risk and governance team says you need to slow down, or the worst-case scenario it is that they turn off a lot of the collaboration capability and everyone gets frustrated.”
It is this provisioning capability of Repstor’s that is of particular interest to Intapp, given that law firms are now outspokenly looking to Teams as the primary workspace for client matter management and file sharing, as well as a quasi-intranet replacement. Am Law 100 law firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough recently deployed Repstor for Teams, with the South Carolina-headquartered firm working towards using Teams to replace email and intranet and become the place where staff ‘live’.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, president and chief client officer Dan Tacone said: “We have been helping firms to understand and embrace the notion of the connected firm, and building out our platform to help connect people, process and data. We had an opportunity to strengthen that with this acquisition. Repstor has a tremendous partnership with Microsoft and has built out solutions including the ability to provision Teams as a key part of the workflow. They are taking the horizontal Microsoft platform and making it work for professional services firms.”
He adds: “Firms are increasingly using the Microsoft stack including Teams for collaboration. It fits in to our platform because it fits with the connected firm across the matter lifecycle. It’s not just winning work, but onboarding and making the client successful and collaborating internally and with the client.”
What this acquisition does represent is a new focus on how professionals – not the business units behind them – deliver their work product. That shift was arguably started with the acquisition of client relationship management system OnePlace and DealCloud but this latest acquisition will see Intapp enter the content management space and become a competitor in the document management world.
Tacone said: “We think that firms will look at it as an alternative to document management. All of us have over the years wondered when Microsoft would come out with that offering. In the early days there were a couple of firms developing their document management system on SharePoint but it was early. Things have moved on and there is an opportunity there. That’s taking nothing away from iManage and NetDocuments as they have built real value for their clients, but there is room for this.” Epona has also long leveraged SharePoint as a document and email management system and is Repstor’s closest competition.
“Repstor powers connected firms, breaking down silos with context-aware collaboration that puts all of a firm’s content and insights in a single, secure place,” said Mark Holman, chief strategy officer at Intapp. “We’re seeing continuing expansion in firms’ use of Microsoft 365 — and specifically Microsoft Teams — for enhanced collaboration and document management. Adding Repstor capabilities to our OnePlace and DealCloud solutions will allow firms using our solutions to better collaborate and access content to boost productivity and improve outcomes across the dealmaking and engagement lifecycle, from strategy through origination and execution.”
Repstor already integrates with Intapp ethical walls capabilities and will be leveraged to enable rights management and supporting secure workflows with firms’ internal and external collaborators.
Christian Rast, global head of technology and knowledge at KPMG international, a mutual client of Intapp and Repstor, said: “KPMG International is pleased to see these two great companies and their technologies growing together. All of their solutions are purpose built for the professional services market; by enhancing Microsoft’s cloud platform with Intapp solutions, they’ll help users excel at digital transformation. Our member firms look forward to leveraging the combined technology power of Repstor and Intapp to accelerate the success of our work and our clients in the professional services industry.”
The transaction is subject to regular and customary closing conditions and is expected to close within the next 30 days.
You can watch Legal IT Insider’s webinar with Repstor – including a demo of Repstor for Teams – here: https://legaltechnology.com/webinar-best-practices-to-help-you-get-the-most-out-of-microsoft-teams/
Our summary of that webinar is here: https://legaltechnology.com/repstor-webinar-findings-how-to-leverage-microsoft-teams-in-a-controlled-way/
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