Intapp has decided to stop using OnePlace in its go-to-market activity, instead serving all its customers, be they law firms, professional services organisations or financial institutions, from within its DealCloud business development and data management platform.
The Nasdaq-listed company acquired legal client relationship management system OnePlace in 2019. While it announced in 2020 that OnePlace would use the DealCloud engine in place of Salesforce, until now, it has maintained two separate brands, with different marketing and business development teams.
Discussing the decision to consolidate around DealCloud, Intapp’s general manager for marketing and business development solutions, Lavinia Calvert, told Legal IT Insider: “We’re in a very privileged position because Intapp services a wide variety of firms that in some form all interact with each other on transactions and deals and opportunities. So, when there is an M&A transaction, a law firm, investment bank, and accountant may be involved and that’s the space in which we play. We are super committed to the legal market and it’s one of the more mature parts of our business. But we’re also increasingly strong in investment banking and private capital markets. We’ve made a decision to serve all of our verticals – legal; accounting; consulting; private capital; and investment banks, with the award-winning DealCloud platform.”
While the decision makes a lot of sense given that the underlying technology is the same, it represents a reversal of Intapp’s decision to consolidate its legal and professional services offering under OnePlace, including grouping its legal collaboration and content suite under the brand.
The move is a reflection of a number of factors, including the huge growth experienced by DealCloud, which now has several thousand clients, including trophy client Goldman Sachs. DealCloud founder Ben Harrison is president of financial services at Intapp and an influential figure in the Palo Alto-headquartered business.
DealCloud, which is hosted in Microsoft Azure, has a strong private equity client base, and this rebrand is perhaps also indicative of the weight given to that sector of the market, with private equity firms typically at the centre of all deals. The decision will also no doubt have been influenced to an extent by the fact that Intapp does not own the OnePlace URL, which belongs to a religious group.
Within the legal sector, it will be interesting to see how lawyers outside of transactional work, such as litigation, react to the change, although there should be no need for law firms to rebrand internally.
While legacy OnePlace customers continue to be migrated from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure after Intapp entered a strategic partnership with Microsoft a year ago, Calvert says that this rebrand will make no difference in terms of the underlying technology. She says: “We want to streamline the way in which we go to market and make it easier for these firms to buy from us and for us to get ourselves more streamlined internally around releases and innovation in the platform.”
She elaborates: “We already have a unified product and engineering group that serve all of the audiences with that same technology. But if you can imagine at the moment we go to market as OnePlace marketing and BD, or OnePlace risk and compliance, and then outside of legal we go with DealCloud – it can be a little bit confusing for the market.”
Intapp is hoping that brand consistency will help it to drive adoption beyond its core marketing and business development teams. Calvert says: “Most marketing and business development teams are there to serve the partners and lawyers or attorneys to help them drive business and pitch for new business. But there’s also other constituencies within those firms, for example, knowledge teams or practice group leads that want slightly different information, and we’re looking at how we build out those solutions that are more specific to their requirements.”
Intapp is now launching practice specific configurations or ‘blueprints’ on how to deploy its technology, leveraging its experience across different industries. Calvert said: “The first two blueprints that we’re coming to market with are built around M&A and fund formation. There are a lot of parallels between how an M&A solution would be configured in the financial services world as well as in the professional services world. So we’re really seeing a lot of opportunity to take some of the expertise and the best practice that we’ve built over the last 10 years in the DealCloud financial services part of the business.”
She adds: “We have thousands of clients using the DealCloud technology so there’s a lot of institutional knowledge, know-how, expertise, and best practices on how to deploy that technology quickly, effectively and drive user adoption, and we are going to leverage more of that expertise that exists within the company into the legal, accounting and consulting sectors.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com