Thomson Reuters just announced that it has acquired Business Integrity, a leading provider of document assembly and contract creation tools to the legal market. Effective immediately, the company is part of the Legal business of Thomson Reuters. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Business Integrity has strong proprietary technology and is well-established in the UK legal market as well as the US and other key jurisdictions around the world. Its primary product is a document and contract automation software solution called ContractExpress (previously DealBuilder), which provides lawyers and end-users with a faster, more efficient way to draft documents while ensuring consistency and reducing risk. Business Integrity is headquartered in London with an office in New York City.
Thomson Reuters say Business Integrity’s leading solutions make an excellent strategic fit and a natural complement to the strong brands and content owned by Thomson Reuters, including Practical Law, Westlaw and its innovative legal software and services offerings.
“The acquisition of Business Integrity helps support our vision of a more efficient and connected legal ecosystem that incorporates powerful technologies and workflow solutions. It complements our existing core offerings and allows us to share new capabilities with our customers around the world,” said Jan-Coos Geesink, managing director for the UK & Ireland legal business at Thomson Reuters. “As such, this is an exciting acquisition and I’m delighted to welcome our new colleagues to Thomson Reuters.”
COMMENT: We’ll have more comment later however an interesting angle here is LexisNexis used to use Business Integrity software to underpin all its document assembly-type products and services, including Lexis Draft and Lexis PSL. More recently LexisNexis announced it was switching to the rival Exari document assembly/automation platform however we understand some Business Integrity tech is still embedded in some Lexis applications. Last month Ashurst announced it was planning to use ContractExpress to automate all its legal precedents.