Litera systems are in the documents space in Legal Tech, they have developed their own software and also acquired some good products on the way (DocXTools being a favourite of many a housestyle champion!)
Workshare have been in law firms for years, legal veterans will probably have used Deltaview in the early days. And Workshare expanded into other areas as that merged into Workshare 3 and brought meta data stripping and the review process.
This month the two companies merged.
But I don’t have a definitive answer to the question posed in the title, in fact I can see two reasons for this merger. First it’s purely a market share grab, take out a competitor and move your product into those firms.
Second and I hope this is the actual answer. Litera have seen some IP in Workshare products that they wanted and will blend the best of the Workshare technology into their own products making something better in the process.
With the improvements in core Microsoft tools and the rapid ongoing deployment of these in the Office 365 ProPlus world and given competitor DocsCorp have just had their best sales results in its 15-year history, it’s certainly a merger that actually makes sense whichever outcome.
From a law firm perspective I would make the call to all these vendors though, follow the Microsoft Office path! Help us exploit all the Office offerings (desktop, mobile and online), make it easy to patch/update your products in this world and help us rid or at least minimise the number of old style office addins we need!
Yes, it’s a market share play. Workshare was not expanding or taking any business away from Litera or Docscorp but they have solid recurring revenue, particularly at the small firm end of the market. Litera can now make massive cost savings by reducing the number of people it takes to run things …watch this play out by the end of 2020.
The IP they are interested in is Transact which adds another string to the bow of the Litera Desktop suite and potentially replaces their Secure Collaboration platform that was being built. I would also bet good money that Litera were in the bidding war for HighQ that TR ultimately won. Since being bought by HG they are on an acquisition spree, and HighQ was an obvious mark. Expect several more acquisitions in the coming 3-5 years that they are owned by HG.
This article is worth a look. This echoes the last point above in consolidating number of addins (assuming of course that the vendor integrates the solutions rather than it just be multiple addins by one vendor!)
https://www.docscorp.com/about/customer-success-stories/document-productivity-tools-Byrne-Wallace/?317