Whether you’re employed by a litigation support provider, use or resell services or software provided by a litigation support provider or just simply want to know what types of employment opportunities may be available in upcoming years, you ought to be aware of the ongoing consolidation in the industry. The boom in electronic discovery brought about by the increasing volume of ESI, the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Sedona and the various discovery sanctions cases have all come together to create a $4 billion dollar industry. As the volume of data being processed escalates, along with the costs associated with the processing, litigation support has become more important to companies in a number of markets, including enterprise content management, data storage hardware, data hosting services, consulting services, facilities management, records archiving, legal process outsourcing and legal publishing.

The following table lists some of the acquisitions that have been made in the litigation support or closely related industries.

Approx. Date	Acquiring	Acquired
30_Oct_2008	LexisNexis	IDEX Inc. (expert witness data)
14 Oct 2008	Planet Data Solutions Inc.	Cerulean LLC
26 Sept 2008	Alexander Gallo Holdings LLC	The Hobard West Group (parent company of Esquire Litigation Solutions, Esquire Deposition Services and DepoNet)
28 Aug 2008	Edmond Scientific Company	Access Litigation Support Services (NatiVIEW)
27 Aug 2008	Ricoh Co.	Ikon Office Solutions ($1.6 B)
24 July 2008	Interwoven Inc.	Discovery Mining Inc. ($36 M)
10 June 2008	FTI Consulting Inc.	Attenex Corp. ($88 M)
5 June 2008	Electronic Evidence Discovery Inc.	Daticon LLC
3 June 2008	Integreon Managed Solutions Inc.	Datum Legal Inc.
20 May 2008	Scarab Consulting	DigIT Technologies, LIT Group and RLS Legal Solutions
6 Dec 2007	Seagate Technology	MetaLincs ($82 M)
31 Oct 2007	Iron Mountain Inc.	Stratify Inc. ($158M)
3 July 2007	Autonomy Corporation plc (London stock exchange)	ZANTAZ Inc. ($375 M)
30 May 2007	Anacomp Inc.	CaseLogistix Inc.
1 March 2007	Merrill Corporation	Lextranet
5 Jan 2007	The Thomson Corp.	Baker Robbins & Company
2 Nov 2006	Oracle Corporation	Stellent Inc. ($440 M) (provides Outside In native file processing software used in many review systems)
6 Oct 2007	Oce N.V.	CaseData Inc.
4 June 2007	Document Technologies Inc. (“DTI”)	Skyline Legal Technologies
28 Sept 2006	Thomson Corporation	LiveNote Technologies
10 Aug 2006	IBM	FileNet Corporation ($1.6 B)
24 July 2006	LexisNexis	Dataflight (Concordance™)
24 July 2006	LexisNexis	CaseSoft (CaseMap and TimeMap)
14 June 2006	Xerox Corporation	Amici LLC ($174 M)
24 April 2006	Pitney Bowes Inc.	Ibis Consulting Inc. ($67 M)
24 Jan 2006	Integreon	Electronic discovery services business from Bowne
21 Nov 2005	Merrill Corporation	WordWave Inc. (court reporting)
Aug 2005	Williams Lea (UK based, majority stake held by Deutsche Post)	Uniscribe ($36 M)
17_March_2005	Thomson Corporation	Hildebrandt International
4 March 2005	Pitney Bowes Mangement Services	CompuLit Inc.
23 Feb 2005	FTI Consulting Inc.	Ringtail Solutions Group ($35 M)
21 Dec 2004	SPI Litigation Direct	i-Base Data Services
1 Dec 2004	Wolters Kluwer	Summation Legal Technologies Inc.
Oct 2004	Williams Lea	Bowne Business Solutions ($190.8 M)
17 Aug 2004	ZANTAZ Inc.	Steelpoint Technologies
18 May 2004	Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc.	Kroll Inc. ($1.9 B)
14 May 2004	Kroll Inc. through Kroll Ontrack Inc.	Quorum Litigation Services LLC ($39 M)
15 July 2003	LexisNexis U.S.	Applied Discovery
24 Nov 1997	Oce N.V.	Archer Management Services
28 Feb 1998	Uniscribe Professional Services	Aspen Systems-Litigation Support (from Lockheed Martin Corp.)
1 Dec 1997	Bowne & Co.	J. Feuerstein Systems division of DocuCon Inc. ($6.5 M)
16 March 1994	DocuCon Inc.	J. Feuerstein Systems Inc. (Litigator’s Notebook)

Litigation support is an example of a market that is becoming increasingly global, a phenomenon that is perhaps best described in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (now out in release 3.0). Cities in which the above acquiring companies have offices include Mumbai, London and Toronto as well as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Any given acquisition can have multiple impacts depending on your relationship to the acquiring or acquired companies, e.g.

• Acquisitions often result in turnover among the project managers and other support staff that clients have grown to depend on resulting in a lack of project continuity
• Resellers of software can find themselves competing against the new owner of the software publisher
• Pricing and licensing terms can change, not always in a manner that is beneficial to clients
• Product development may be suspended during the post-acquisition absorption process and then may be renewed, accelerated or redirected
• Conflicts of interest can be created when providers for plaintiff and defendant merge

Acquiring companies can be looking for various benefits when acquiring a company, e.g.

• Installed base to which acquiring companies products could be sold
• Feet-on-the-street, i.e. an existing sales force
• Technology to differentiate services or hardware offerings
  • Consulting companies looking for technology
  • Hardware looking for software
  • Technology looking for consulting opportunity
• Revenue
• Offshore companies looking for domestic distribution
• Geographic market expansion
• Vertical market expansion

Whether a company will be acquired or continue organic growth is probably mostly determined by the “DNA” of the founders, e.g. did they start their careers in litigation support or are they serial entrepreneurs. In any event, companies with a track record of success in litigation support will be almost certain to attract significant acquisition interest. Companies to watch in the upcoming year:

• Clearwell
• Equivio
• Recommind
• Guidance Software (Encase)
• Wave Software (Trident)
• kCura (Relativity)

The largest potential market disruptions may well come from Google or Microsoft. Note that Google is already offering e-mail archiving services as well as “cloud” computing services.