Edited 17:59 9/1/25 from saying that Tranch is a partner of Aderant, SAP, Oracle NetSuite and HubSpot to Tranch works with customers of those companies.
We spoke with Elite’s CEO Mark Dorman and Tranch’s CEO and co-founder Philip Kelvin about the acquisition
Elite this week announced the acquisition of invoice automation and payment platform Tranch, in a move to fully embed a technology that helps law firms automate collections processes that are still often manual and prone to error.
Founded in 2021 by analyst/management consultant Philip Kelvin and software developer Beau Allison, Tranch’s electronic payment offerings include a ‘pay now’ via bank transfer option; ‘pay by card’ including virtual card terminals for billing teams; and ‘pay later’ which allows law firm clients to spread out their payments over time. The latter option means law firms are paid up front, while clients pay over a period of between two and 12 months. In November 2022, Goodwin became the first major law firm to offer clients the option to pay on this basis through Tranch, which provides credit underwriting based on banking data, adding a percentage fee onto the invoice.
Tranch’s founders are both based in London but in 2022 it received backing from respected American technology startup accelerator Y Combinator, at which point operations moved to New York. To give you some idea of value, while the 11-employee-strong company is young, in January 2023 it raised a $100m seed round led by New York backer Soma Capital, FoundersX and with a credit facility from Clear Haven Capital Management. Other investors include Berlin-headquartered Global Founders Capital.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the acquisition, Elite’s CEO Mark Dorman observed that as Elite morphs into a SaaS company, it is thinking about how to solve customers’ wider problems. “Part of the challenge that law firms face is that their overheads are going up, but they’re still not collecting all of the money that they’re owed for the for the work that they’ve actually done and the fees that they’ve actually billed,” he said. “As we think of expanding out to be a best-in-class SaaS solution, payments was an obvious component, given that we deliver all of the way across WIP to cash for our customers. The important end part of that is making sure we have a great invoice management and payment solution that gives a seamless experience to our customers.”
The legal sector 
is somewhat unique in charging clients after the work has been done, Kelvin says. “Unlike your Christmas presents, where you pay and they arrive, law firms have never really worked on that last section, so if a client doesn’t have an invoice for X amount of days and you make it difficult for them to pay, the odds are they might not, and they’re probably not going to pay that invoice anywhere near on time. Some people might not pay because it just gets lost.
“As Mark said, overheads have been going up but a lot of firms across the US are in triple digit collection days. Our view is how can we get the invoice to the client as quickly as possible and make it easy for them to pay? And that’s what we have been working on for a number of years.”
The legal sector has clung on to notoriously manual billing and collections processes and Kelvin adds: “One thing that shocked me running a US business is that around 30-40% of US firms receive their payments via cheque, whereas the equivalent for B2B payments in the UK is about 0-2%.”
That is to say nothing of the largely manual, email-based process that many firms use to send out invoices in the first place. Dorman said: “While firms may get all of the information digitally – so the invoice is created out of the ERP digitally – there’s a manual process that involves lots of people in the firm, in an unstructured way sending bills or invoices out to the client, and then how do you track that and make sure the payment matches the invoice when it comes back in? There’s a whole workflow at the back end, not just the payment. That is what we want to make a much more seamless and integrated process and Tranch does a great job of connecting those two components together.”
Elite has partnered with Tranch for over a year, but Tranch also works with customers of Aderant, SAP, Oracle NetSuite and HubSpot, so what does this acquisition mean for them? Elite says Tranch will continue to work with other ERPs, with Dorman observing: “Just like eBillingHub doesn’t have to work with 3E, if Tranch customers work with other ERPs obviously that just continues.” He adds: “That’s not a new thing. Similarly in other areas such as time collection for example, we work with many vendors, but we have we believe we’ve got the best in class time collection solution in 3E.”
Another important area for Elite customers to note is how the buy-now-pay-later option works from a financial perspective. Dorman said that Elite will continue to operate Tranch’s underwriting system and added: “We have a commercial grade component that sits underneath that will enable payment to happen to the law firm and then collection from the enterprise over a period of time but as Philip said, this is very different than a Klarna because it’s B2B and we’ve got the necessary underlying support to be able to do that.”
Dorman says this doesn’t mean Elite is in effect entering a quasi-financial services role, commenting: “No we’re not going to be turning into a bank. That’s not our job. It’s just an option we have with other partners that we use in the back end of the system to be able to support us to enable that action to happen.”
Tranch’s impressive list of customers include Gunderson Dettmer, Paul Hastings, Perkins Coie, Akin, Goodwin, Wiggin and Fenwick. To find out more about the company and its products you can go to www.tranch.com
Other examples of legal practice management vendors combining with payments companies include the 2022 acquisition by AffiniPay, parent company of LawPay, of MyCase. You can read more about that below:
Interview: What does AffiniPay’s acquisition of MyCase mean for the market and end users?