Epiq announced yesterday (4 September) the acquisition of 36-strong Intapp implementation partner Inflection IT, reflecting in large part the rise in challenges that law firms are facing in safely facilitating the use of AI across their tech stack – and the opportunities that lay in wait for those that do.
Inflection IT was founded in California in 2014 by former Intapp product managers Steve Surrette and Jeff Armbrecht. Its proud strapline is ‘we only implement Intapp’ and the team is expert in Intapp Walls but also Intake, Conflicts, Time and Documents – Intapp’s 365-based document, email and matter lifecycle solution that grew from its acquisition of Repstor.
Epiq has long been an Intapp certified implementation partner, but this acquisition brings significantly more capability within the fold – all 36 Inflection IT employees are joining Epiq.
The timing is not a coincidence. Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the acquisition, Ziad Mantoura (pictured below), senior vice president & general manager for enterprise legal & consulting solutions at Epiq, said: “When it comes to the practice of law, law firms have built very sophisticated controls around who can access what. You don’t find that in any other company and it’s why people trust the world’s leading law firms with anything, including highly confidential and secret information. But it can also be a limitation. The last thing they want to do is say ‘we have this fantastic AI tool and we’re now putting it against all our clients’ data to find out what is truly the market standard across all our deals.’ Naturally, they have to be very careful and that is a limitation. You have to get it right, but you also can’t have your systems just siloed. Your whole ecosystem is going to get more connected and often more complex.”
Epiq is a Microsoft partner – last year it won the worldwide compliance partner of the year – and Mantoura said: “Getting it right in conjunction with knowledge management and what you’re doing with Microsoft is the journey that all law firms are on. Having a partner that can stitch all that together is really important.”
Inflection IT will join Fireman, Epiq’s legal management consulting arm from its acquisition of Fireman & Company in 2022. For Inflection IT, Surrette says that some of the excitement will be in having greater resource and capability to deliver their services. “Epiq is bringing over our entire team and I’m looking forward to growing together,” he says.
While the benefit to law firms of this acquisition is an integrated service model, that does come at the expense of another independent specialist being absorbed into a much larger organisation. Legal IT Insider’s lead analyst Neil Cameron observed: “This acquisition is part of a broader consolidation wave that has thinned the ranks of independent law-firm advisors. A decade ago, firms could choose from a long tail of boutique consultancies, each with it’s own flavour of expertise and useful idiosyncrasies. Today, the options are increasingly concentrated.
There is, however, no doubt of the need to meet growing demand. One of the primary recent areas of focus for Inflection IT has been using Walls to secure SharePoint to make sure that Copilot can’t read information it shouldn’t be able to access. Mantoura says: “To a certain extent it doesn’t matter if it’s Copilot or Harvey, Gemini or Google or something that’s released tomorrow. The principle is the same – the LLM is trained on a huge amount of data and augmented with the data from your firm. To make it really effective that does need to happen but you have to be able to do it without it accessing confidential information.”
Most firms will have massively restricted the reach of the likes of Copilot and Mantoura says: “Plenty of law firms have Copilot to some extent but usually it’s very locked down. Firms’ reputations are really important and if the client doesn’t trust them, they won’t use them. A lot of firms have a way to go in their adoption of AI, particularly in the practice of law area.”
For Mantoura, this acquisition is another opportunity to accelerate bringing together the business and practice of law. He says: “How many negotiations are going on right now in London or New York where the partner is saying ‘this is not market’ based on their experience and another is saying ‘I have 25 years of experience of what’s market.’ The world we will be in is that law firms will be using technology to analyse the last 800 deals, and those that do will be able to show what’s actually market. We’re moving to a different world in the practice of law and I’ve said it in the past but will say it again: the law firm that gets this right will be far more profitable than they are today, because clients will pay for better outcomes.”