In its second acquisition announcement in six days, Litera will today (16 August) reveal that it has acquired legal and professional services talent management vendor Micron Systems, addressing firms’ needs to engage and retain their people.
Micron, which was founded in 1992 and is headquartered in New Jersey, streamlines the talent management lifecycle of recruiting, continuing education, performance review, and work allocation. Its longstanding CEO is David Wit.
Haley Altman, who has headed M&A at Litera but following this deal moves into a strategic consulting role for Litera, we can reveal, told Legal IT Insider: “Micron has been in the industry for decades and built a comprehensive talent management solution for law firms and accounting firms. Their deep base in the legal industry gives them key insight into the entire attorney career path from interview to onboarding, learning, skill-building, work allocation and performance review. The Micron tools help attorneys set a career path for success in the firm and provide tools to help firms retain attorneys. Customer feedback on their products, particularly the learning and compliance tool set, makes us excited to bring Micron into the Litera product family at a critical time for firms focus on bolstering their talent management process.”
The intention is to integrate Micron with performance management tool Objective Manager, which Litera acquired in 2021. Objective Manager helps to align objectives and goals to the strategic goals of the firm, and improve engagement in the performance process. Asked whether it had been hoped that Objective Manager would extend to talent management and what the overlap is, Altman said: “Objective Manager gave us our start at understanding the importance of talent management, helping people track their strategic goals both at the firm and with clients. It is a key part of the overall process and helps enhance our talent management solution. When we can combine those features with the data on skills form Clocktimizer, we can start to build comprehensive view of an attorney’s career progression.”
As employee attrition rates continue to rise, talent management is a primary focus for law firms. According to a recent National Association for Law Placement (NALP) Foundation Report, attrition rates rose from 16% in 2020 to 26% in 2021, with the number of associates leaving firms after one year rising from 6% to 10% during the same timeframe. The NALP Foundation estimates the average cost of losing an associate is between $200,000 to $500,000.
Exiting lawyers often cite a lack of quality work, clear career progression, and access to interesting practice areas as reasons for leaving. Other reasons include inconsistencies in how practice groups monitor and measure performance and disparate systems and processes that help professional advancement and accreditation compliance, including learning management and tracking Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credits.
Commenting on the deal, Sheryl Hoskins, Litera’s CEO, said: “Bringing Micron Systems into the Litera portfolio is an important step in furthering our ability to address our clients’ most pressing needs. The battle to attract and retain top talent is one of the biggest challenges firms face today, and Micron Systems simplifies the spectrum of talent management tasks.”
Litera last week (10 August) announced that it has acquired business intelligence vendor BigSquare. See here for our analysis of that acquisition: https://legaltechnology.com/2022/08/15/analysis-literas-acquisition-of-bigsquare-and-its-future-plans-for-bi/