Litera will end support for DocsCorp and Workshare middleware products at the end of this year and has cut DocsCorp marketing and product roles in Australia, as all focus now goes on helping customers to move to Litera Compare.
Litera acquired rival DocsCorp in 2021 and Workshare in 2019: both specialised in products around the editing and review of documents. Litera will in December end support for DocsCorp compareDocs and CleanDocs, as well as Workshare Compare, with senior director for corporate marketing, Amber van Moessner telling Legal IT Insider: “We are ending support in December so that we can focus on Litera Compare and on making it a really strong product. We’re using all of the pieces of those products to make sure that Litera Compare is solid and easily accessible.” She added: “We can’t easily support duplicated systems that have the same functionality.”
Litera has consolidated its marketing team within North America and EMEA, cutting around five DocsCorp marketing roles that were based in Australia, where DocsCorp was founded. On the product side, those people who were previously involved in Australia with compareDocs, cleanDocs and Workshare Compare have also been made redundant.
Van Moessner, who joined in March this year, one month after new chief marketing officer Bruno Trimouille, said that the redundancies amount to less than 3% of global headcount and stressed that the perception in the market that Litera is pulling out of Australia is not correct, commenting: “The perception that we are pulling out of the region couldn’t be further from the truth. Before I joined, marketing was uneven across the company, but Bruno joined in February and I joined in March and we’re working towards a consistent brand vision.
“For customers we have communicated that we are ending support and we are working with them to move them to the new product, which is better. It’s not like taking something which is superior and getting rid of it, we’re building a solution with a better UI and that’s more functional and has more products rolled into one, plus we have support systems to help customers.”
Van Moessner stressed that DocsCorp and Workshare products are not being end of lifed, commenting: “We’re ending support. In the same way as you can’t use the same car or laptop forever, we’re trying to move everyone to the current iteration, which takes some of the functionality of those other products.
“This is part of our whole strategy: products need to be updated and consolidated. We’re not acquiring companies for any reason other than they are the best technology to accommodate our existing technology stack but sometimes that requires integration. Having multiple tools is complicated. Adoption is the name of the game and if you’re a law firm not using software because it’s complicated or you don’t know which tool to use, that doesn’t help anyone. The goal is to make it easier to use the products. That means having a single solution.”
The goal is to move all customers to Litera Compare this year, which Moessner said is achievable, commenting: “One of the largest investments we’ve made in the past year is in customer support. Previously we would acquire a company and that support system would stay in place. If you owned different Litera products, you would have different touch points for different services. Now you have a single unified experience, not piecemeal support. We’ve invested a lot of money in customer support and that is ongoing. We’re still building customer resources and adoption resources online and a lot of energy is going into that.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com