Harbor has acquired leading UK legal technology training provider iTrain, bolstering its ability to help clients with change management and technology adoption – a key priority for all law firms right now.
This follows Harbor’s November 2025 acquisition of US managed training provider Encoretech, filling a missing link on both sides of the Atlantic.
The acquisitions follow majority investment from BayPine in June last year, since when Harbor has also acquired UK human capital management provider CE Global Partners.
iTrain as a concept was ‘born’ in 2008 when founder Dorigen Sykes – then an IT training manager at DWF – was unable to finding external training support for an iManage rollout. Founded in 2015 after Sykes left Brabners – with Brabners as its first client – the company has grown to 15, and very recently hired former Thorntons IT director Sarah Blair. While its primary focus is the legal sector, iTrain also has professional services and public sector clients.
ITrain’s first strategic partnership was with iManage and it has subsequently built partnerships with Aderant, NetDocuments, Intapp, Elite and others. It has helped firms with AI adoption, including an active pipeline of Microsoft Copilot adoption programs, AI readiness assessments, and AI transformation engagements. It offers a Training-as-a-Service (TaaS) model and an AI-enabled learning management platform, delivering recurring training and adoption support at scale.
The iTrain team joins Harbor’s enterprise solutions practice and speaking to Legal IT Insider, Harbor’s practice group leader for enterprise solutions, Justin Farmer, said that iTrain has market dominance in and around adoption, observing: “You know Dorigan’s reputation, you know what she is delivering and the quality of the work that she’s doing. And obviously, you know where the market is and what the opportunity is. It’s around tech adoption and how do we maximize or help firms maximize their technology spend when it comes to transformational technologies.
“So if you think about AI, but also optimization for the technologies that firms already operate under, whether enterprise operations or legal, the idea is bringing your best practice around and that expertise into the UK market. We see it as a really important strategic step for us in offering a full suite of services for the law firms in that space.” The services from iTrain will be an add-on service for customers.
The acquisition arrives at a defining moment. According to the 2026 Future Ready Lawyer Survey from Wolters Kluwer, inadequate training remains one of the most consistently cited barriers to AI adoption in law firms.
This is despite the fact that law firm technology spending grew 9.7% in 2025, the fastest real growth in the industry’s history (according to the 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market from Thomson Reuters and Georgetown Law).
Farmer said that iTrain helps firms to cut through the noise in the market and see the value from the investments they are making. Key to that is the partnerships that iTrain has forged, which mirror Harbor’s own partnerships and relationships. While core technologies are key, so too are AI tools such as Copilot, and Farmer observed: “One of the reasons we really like what Dorigen is doing is that she’s staying on the edge and learning and building this practice around AI and adoption, especially Copilot and how that can be effective within these firms.”
Farmer, said that iTrain’s content and methodologies are a key part of the acquisition.
“We built iTrain around a simple belief: technology only delivers value when people actually use it well,” said Sykes. “Joining Harbor gives us a much bigger platform to deliver on that belief and access to a firm whose clients are facing exactly the challenges we’ve spent years learning to solve. We’re excited about what we’ll build together.”
