US growth advisory firm Baretz+Brunelle has acquired LexFusion, with LexFusion’s three founding partners Joe Borstein, Casey Flaherty, and Paul Stroka joining B+B as partners. The deal represents a significant milestone in B+B’s own growth trajectory, marking its first acquisition under B+B CEO Mike McNamara, the former CEO of Dentons US, who joined last year.
LexFusion was founded in 2020 as a go-to-market collective or ecosystem of companies, curated by its founders, to help organisations transform their operations.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the acquisition, McNamara said: “Our focus, particularly with me coming on board, was to really focus on law and legal as the asset class it is today. Our focus has been to operate at that intersection of reputation, talent, revenue, leadership, capital and innovation. All of the front of the house concerns that are driving growth within the legal industry. Baretz+Brunelle and LexFusion share a vision of how we drive innovation, and we can power that together far better as a union.”
It is anticipated that the strength of B+B’s relationships with the world’s leading law firms, combined with LexFusion’s ties to in-house counsel, legal operations professionals, and legal technology companies, will offer immediate value to each organisation’s client base.
In terms of the perceived benefit of the union to B+B customers, McNamara says: “From my vantage point and thinking about where we add depth to the B+B offering, you have some of the best, well known and respected individuals in legal innovation and tech evangelists now as part of our team as our partners.”
From a LexFusion perspective, Borstein said: “For LexFusion clients, we aspired to be and did a pretty good job of being an outside chief revenue officer. But what B+B brings to the table are first of all a massive personality fit: Mike was former managing partner of one of the world’s largest law firms and understands the buyer. And then when you get to the legal technology community, we can truly say we support at the highest level virtually everything, which is extremely powerful.”
Founded in 2016 by Spencer Baretz and Cari Brunelle, B+B is a trusted adviser to the C-suite at Am Law 100 and 200 law firms and Borstein added: “Not to beat this drum too hard but Mike is a global brand name and that alone brings so much value to our members to be able to sit down with him and think about how their product could be better integrated into a law firm. From the other side, we have tremendous relationships with large law firms and corporates and to help those organisations grow not just the way we help them, but also the way B+B helps, and we’ll be figuring out how to bring the best of both together.”
LexFusion’s member companies are:
- Agiloft, a leading contract lifecycle management company recently acquired by KKR;
- DISCO (NYSE: LAW), an AI-powered e-discovery, case management, and legal document review company for enterprises, law firms, legal service providers, and governments;
- Factor, an AI-focused legal service provider for contracting and other complex legal work, backed by Carrick Capital Partners;
- Fides, the corporate governance/entity management platform backed by Sequoia, La Famiglia, Auxxo, and Angel Invest;
- Hotshot, a digital learning platform for law firms and law departments;
- LegalBillReview.com, a tech-enabled managed invoice review and legal spend management partner for mid-market and Fortune 100 law departments;
- LegalMation, the generative AI company for high-volume responsive pleadings, discovery requests, and other litigation workflows, recently backed by Aquiline Capital Partners LP;
- Litera, the global provider of market-leading legal workflow software for law firms, acquired by Hg Capital in 2019; and
- Macro, the AI productivity suite and workspace for law firms and banks.