Litera has acquired UK-founded plug-and-play AI document automation provider Office & Dragons, which has in the past year has been rolled out globally by law firms including Stephenson Harwood, Pinsent Masons and Burness Paull.
This is Litera’s second acquisition of 2024 and first since the announcement that Avaneesh Marwaha has returned as CEO.
Office & Dragons was co-founded in 2019 by former Kirkland & Ellis private equity lawyer Sam Smolkin and former data analyst Matthew Philson, respectively CEO and COO of the startup, which leverages automation and generative AI to streamline document creation and editing. Smolkin was educated in the US and got his law degree at Harvard but was an associate in Kirkland’s London office.
He said: “The entire O&D team will be coming on board, and we’re excited about the opportunities to grow our platform with Litera’s extensive resources and complementary products. With integrations spanning Compare, Kira, Transact, and beyond, we aim to make Office & Dragons an essential part of every lawyer’s toolkit—helping them save hours of repetitive work, focus on higher-value tasks, and improve their quality of life.”
It is envisaged that the combined offerings from Litera and Office & Dragons will help law firms to generate, edit, and redline documents faster and more accurately. “I’ve been so impressed by Sam’s understanding of the market, involvement in the industry, and passion for building strong solutions for the legal tech community,” said Marwaha. “This acquisition is a prime example of Litera’s ongoing commitment to expand our portfolio with mission-critical tools that integrate with native attorney workflows.”
While Litera has in the past undertaken what Marwaha refers to as “competitive” acquisitions in the document space (Workshare and DocsCorp, for example), and undertaken a significant amount of work in attempting to integrate those acquisitions, he recently told Legal IT Insider that the acquisitions moving forward will be net new feature acquisitions.
“What has shifted is that a lot of what we did in 2017 to 2021 was consolidating into a new way of working and that was heavy lift integration work,” he said. “The amount of work the team has done allows us to acquire new technology and integrate it really quickly. You will see less competitive acquisitions, but more net new feature acquisitions. We have a lot on the roadmap, and if we can accelerate through acquisition, we’re excited to do so. Don’t be surprised if we keep acquiring, but the breath and size of the acquisitions will change.”
Litera has now completed a total of 17 acquisitions, the most recent of which was in July this year, when it acquired information governance provider FileTrail.
Click here to learn more about Office & Dragons.