Robert Ambrogi Blog
iManage, the company whose document and email management platform is used by 70 percent or more of the large firm market, said today that it has acquired Elegrity, a San Francisco provider of risk and compliance management software for law firms and businesses whose primary products are designed to help firms reduce risk by automating client intake and conflicts checking.
The acquisition expands iManage’s capabilities in risk and compliance management across virtually every stage of a matter’s lifecycle. Data that law firms collect and input as part of the intake and conflicts-checking process will be integrated directly into iManage. A key benefit of that is that it ensures that matters are properly classified from the outset.
The integration also opens the possibility of using RAVN, the artificial intelligence platform iManage acquired last year, to further automate and enhance conflicts checking.
Earlier this week, I spoke about the acquisition with Dan Carmel, chief marketing officer at iManage, and Joy E. Spicer, founder and CEO of Elegrity. They told me that iManage will now offer two new products derived from the Elegrity platform but with iManage’s look and feel:
- iManage Business Intake Manager, a module for automating the client-intake process and ensuring that client information is complete, consistent and accurate.
- iManage Conflicts Manager, a module for more accurately and efficiently detecting potential conflicts of interest.
iManage says the acquisition extends its governance capabilities across every stage of the client-matter lifecycle.
“This definitely marks our emergence from being a traditional document-management vendor,” Carmel said. “But we’re continuing to focus on the content side of it.”
Although the acquisition is being announced today, the transaction is already concluded. Elegrity will become a business unit — or “center of excellence” as iManage calls it — within iManage, and Spicer has joined iManage to lead that business unit. All of Elegrity’s roughly two-dozen employees have also joined iManage.
iManage and Elegrity were founded the same year, 1998, and both count large law firms as their primary customer base.
Spicer said that she has spent a number of years refining Elegrity’s business process software and that she is excited to be integrating it with iManage. A key exciting piece for her, she said, will be exploring the application of RAVN to the conflicts function, which is extremely data intensive. RAVN’s AI could reduce the labor intensity of the process and more intelligently surface potential issues, she said.