We speak to Harbor’s CEO Matt Sunderman and new head of content Damian Jeal, who joins with the acquisition of UK legal tech services provider Ascertus
Transatlantic legal services consultancy Harbor yesterday (29th October) announced the acquisition of UK iManage implementation partner Ascertus, in a strategic move to strengthen its presence in the UK and expand its service offerings in the document and content management space. Significantly, the acquisition also bolsters Harbor’s presence in the corporate legal market, where 50% of Ascertus’ customers are from.
Ascertus’ COO and CRO Damian Jeal will lead Harbor’s global content management and collaboration practice. Roy Russell, the longstanding founder and CEO of Ascertus, will act as an adviser during the integration process and is then expected to retire.
Harbor, which is made up of Wilson Allen, LAC Group and HBR Consulting and has subsequently acquired companies including UK legal services provider Pinnacle and advisory firm Stout, now has 800+ employees globally. Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the acquisition, Harbor’s CEO Matt Sunderman said that Harbor wants to help law firms and corporates across the entire enterprise stack.
“We want to be the partner to be able to front assess, implement and manage across the entire enterprise application stack for law firms,” Sunderman said. “Similarly, on the corporate side, it’s different solutions, but Damian and the Ascertus team have started down the contract life cycle management, enterprise lifecycle management, and legal hold or litigation support workflow routes. So on the corporate side it’s a similar thesis: we want to be able to provide an end-to-end offering for each of the major technologies on a global basis. That’s the key piece. So not just North America and not just the UK, not just Asia-Pacific, but to have end-to-end capabilities both end markets In all three geographies.”
While Harbor’s acquisition of Pinnacle opened it up to some work in the content space, this acquisition is its first meaningful entry into that space. Sunderman said: “Pinnacle had some resources but didn’t play there as much, and obviously that’s what Ascertus is known for.”
Possibly the most exciting part of the acquisition for Harbor is the mix of UK corporate customers. Sunderman told us: “Harbor serves large law firms and corporations. Ascertus does the same, but Harbor had no real inroads into the UK or Continental Europe market on the corporate side. So, this allows us to truly be at both end of the market on a global basis and it rounds out our portfolio of solutions as well.”
Ascertus was founded by Russell in 2000 and has north of 60 staff. Jeal said: “In the last few years we’ve started to work with bigger corporates and bigger law firms and Harbor is going to allow us to do a lot more. The size of the team doubles overnight in terms of delivery and it covers the complete geography. It allows us to offer a lot more to customers than we could before. We were very stuck in that one solution area.”
Organisationally, there are people at Ascertus and Harbor whose histories go back 20-plus years. Russell had a brief tenure at Huron Consulting when Sunderman worked there, also overlapping with Harbor’s chief growth officer Kevin Clem. Ascertus and Harbor have just delivered a joint project for a large corporate law department and Sunderman said: “So we’re not foreign from working together and the teams are even delivering right now.”