Markets on the move

As reported by alm, Legaltech group Litera is acquiring industry leader Kira, effective Sept. 1 of this year. The product and brand are to be continued, and at the same time Litera is aiming for market expansion. Why and to what extent can this also be significant for Europe?

Kira is a specialist in AI-based automated document analysis. Main use case is due diligences / data rooms in transactions. Accordingly, Kira's customers are mainly law firms, globally.

Litera, which has grown enormously through numerous acquisitions, describes itself as a leading provider of legal workflow and workspace software. The focus is clearly on speed and effectiveness of legal work towards client service and retention. Litera sees itself as one-stop-shop for any type of legal work. That's why Litera aims to leverage Kira's core expertise in its own software suite. 

The big difference, however, is that Litera also operates in the corporate law market, and by spinning off its own new startup Zuva, Kira is also expected to follow this path in the future.

Consultants on both sides of the Atlantic won't be too happy to hear that.

Legal Software: The end of one-stop-shops?

Recently, it was reported on alm.com that customers are increasingly turning away from one-stop shops and toward individual technological solutions. Similar comments have also been heard in Viennese legal circles. What is behind all this?

First of all, a paradigm shift is taking place. Up to now, law firms have usually aimed to use as few products as possible in order to avoid interface issues and to have the greatest possible transparency in terms of costs and use. If a change of direction is now on the horizon, surely there must be some dissatisfaction?

Indeed, proponents of diversification say that "one" product is not capable of meeting the highly diverse needs of individual practice groups in larger organizations. One would add that experience with legacy law firm management software also shows how once agile developments can become quite cumbersome monoliths - at least from the customer's perspective. But are isolated products the solution?

The moment to answer this question has not yet come. In any case, an absolute prerequisite would be a standardization of interfaces across providers, and if possible even across countries. This is not easy to imagine. But at least a sum of individual products could definitely develop faster than large "tankers". For this to happen, however, the "top dogs" among the software manufacturers would have to abandon their policy of isolation and approach other, mostly newer, providers. One can hope for that.