Every so often I get an really interesting one pager in my inbox titled “Aggregators in the Legal Technology Market”, it shows all the individual software that fits under about ten or eleven suppliers. So for example, Kira, Clocktimizer, Workshare, Prosperoware, DocsCorp – all owned by the same supplier. Sort of like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever own pretty much all the washing powders brands you can think of!
I’ve blogged about this kind of thing a few times in the distant past, sometimes getting under the skin of one or two companies who insisted their merger or purchase was for the benefit of the customer (rather than for the £’s, $’s or €’s) but then many years later said products were still separate or in some cases the “magic” technology jettisoned completely.
The difference this time is a lot of the companies seem to be running more as a conglomerate, no aim to integrate all the technologies and for some nor to present a user journey through all their individual technologies. Is this a good thing or not? I’m not sure, but I would love to see some kind of capability map across the various applications under each supplier so I could see who covers what. Something I may attempt in a future blog (unless anyone else has done so already, if so let me know in the comments).
I recently had a twitter back and forth with a good friend on the topic of platforms and tight integration vs loosely coupled tools doing specific functions (a topic I also talked about at BLTF 2020 and blogged about here).
To me this has to be a priority for these “conglomerates”, it’s alright having loads of separate apps for separate functions as long as they integrate nicely and have a consistent data model (oh for there to be a nice legal data reference model available in the public domain that vendors could broadly align to). I know some do, but please opt for an open integration rather than a proprietary method/tool to do so. If your applications are great we will buy them from you we don’t need tying into your ecosystem so we have to (Don’t be a facebook, or AOL for those of my generation).
Anyway if you’re interested in the document I mentioned it’s produced by Hyperscale Group and I think you can sign up to receive it on their website.
