We speak about the acquisition with Digitory’s founder and CEO Catherine Krow, and BigHand’s managing director of people productivity, Eric Wangler.
BigHand has acquired 2015-founded cost analytics vendor Digitory Legal, which enables law firms to analyse their billing narratives to shape future pricing and proposals. It also enables firms to understand and improve the diversity, equity and inclusion levels on a matter, and helps corporate legal teams unpick pricing in RFPs and panel processes using its UTBMS+ coding methodology.
Digitory’s founder and chief executive, Catherine Krow, has joined BigHand as managing director of diversity and impact analytics. Her three-strong team, based in San Francisco but working remotely, are all joining BigHand, which has officially partnered with Digitory since April 2021.
Krow is a former litigation attorney who spent 17 years at Orrick, 12 of which were as a partner. She joins BigHand effective as of today (22 August), and BigHand’s managing director of people productivity, Eric Wangler said that Digitory’s technology will, going forward, integrate both with its pricing and task management offerings.
Whereas BigHand Resource Management, which stems from its acquisition of Mason & Cook, surfaces at a high level what fee-earners are working on, Digitory does a deeper dive in terms of DEI.
Krow said: “We recently received an award from CLOC [Corporate Legal Operations Consortium] and that had a lot to do with our work in DEI. Clients really want not just quantitative but qualitative analysis around who is doing what, and they are pushing more onto law firms, who are working hard to get ahead of it.”
She added: “This plays in beautifully with what BigHand has done on resource management. When you layer in our timecard analysis, it gives law firms the power to deliver what clients are asking for more vocally than ever before.”
Digitory will become the DEI dashboard within BigHand Resource Management. Its timecard analysis will also feed into its matter pricing solution.
Existing customers will continue to be able to use Digitory on its own if they wish and Wangler said: “We will still be providing discrete Digitory services, and our intention is to resource the heck out of it, which will be good for our clients.”
BigHand’s chief marketing officer Briana McCrory said: “Our approach across all M&A is that if it integrates, great, but we are never going to force customers to upgrade to a bigger BigHand product. We’ll continue to develop Digitory on its own as a specialist and discrete solution. If general counsel need an analysis of their outside counsel, we can do that, but it also bolts into the other technology that we have.”
Krow was named a 2018 Top 10 Woman Entrepreneur In Cloud Innovation, was a 2019 American Bar Association “Women of Legal Technology List” honoree and included in the FastCase 50 Class of 2019 “honoring the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, & leaders”.
Financial details for this transaction were not disclosed.
caroline@legaltechnology.com