Hi and welcome to the June Orange Rag, where the month for us at Legal IT Insider has been dominated by conversations for a report out today (30 June) looking into the future shape of law firm IT. Don’t miss our top story, which teases out just a few of the key findings of the report – you can now download it for free using the link below. Here’s a spoiler: the majority of UK law firm IT departments are spending 0-20% of their time on value-add and innovation projects. I’ll be looking at some of the key findings in the coming weeks, so get in touch if you vehemently agree or disagree.
The dominating theme of this month was again legal tech acquisitions, and I have split ‘acquisitions and funding’ out from our ‘wins and deals’ section, which should make it easier to see just how much activity there was globally in June.
North America has dominated for acquisitions, with Intapp acquiring Billstream from Wilson Allen; AffiniPay acquiring MyCase; TCDI acquiring Aon’s eDiscovery practice; and Ontra buying FundFormer. However, there has been activity across APAC and EMEA too. Earlier this month I spoke with Intapp’s president Dan Tacone and the CEOs of both AffiniPay and MyCase, and at their heart they both are designed to reduce the time it takes lawyers to get paid. It’s interesting to note that in the UK, practice and case management vendor Access Legal in June also announced that it has partnered with Legl to streamline payments for law firms.
Don’t forget to contact us if you want to be part of our forthcoming CRM report, which is the first in a series of ‘Gartner for Legal’ deep dives written by lead analyst Neil Cameron. We have already had a good uptake and will be embarking on the research fairly soon.
Now is the time when we would all have been starting to look forward to things winding down a bit over the summer. Am I wrong in thinking that those days are over?!