Today Onit announced its acquisition of the case management system LawBase. This follows the early 2025 acquisition of Legal Files, another case management system, and deepens Onit’s commitment and foothold in the SLED market.
Priori Adds Ebilling Functionality
Priori, a legal technology platform for outside counsel decision-making, has launched a flexible ebilling integration and Next Steps Flow within its Panel Management and RFP platform. This new functionality provides post-RFP accountability and budget oversight without limiting which ebilling provider is used by Priori clients.
Hercules AI Verify Acquired
Some time ago I posted about an outside counsel guidelines validation tool called Verify made by Hercules AI. I saw it at the ILTA Summer Conference and was bowled over by the product.
It has been reported that Hercules AI has sold 3 of its products, Verify, Apollo (an AI-powered time capture tool) and Athena (an AI-driven email management tool) to Aderant. See here for the press release.
It will be interesting to see what Aderant does with these systems to enhance its product suite, especially the Verify system.
Acquisition of Elite
Bob Ambrogi reports that Elite has been acquired by Francisco Partners, a global investment firm that specializes in partnering with technology businesses from its current owners, TPG Capital and Thomson Reuters. Our best wishes to our friends at Elite in this new iteration of the company.
Brightflag Acquired by Wolters Kluwer
Just read that Wolters Kluwer has acquired ELM vendor Brightflag for $480M. See here for more on the acquisition.
As ever, the legal ebilling world continues to amaze with acquisitions in this space. One can only wonder what else is in store…
Bottomline Legal Spend Management Acquired by Sedgwick
It was announced today that Sedgwick TPA has acquired Bottomline’s Legal Spend Management Division, including the Legal-X and Legal eXchange platforms. Bottomline’s legal spend products are leading solutions in the insurance industry and include TPA features for managing claims, so this looks like a good fit. The acquisition combines Bottomline’s legal spend platforms with other Sedgwick claims and bill review solutions, allowing for a full suite of solutions under a new Sedgwick Legal Spend Management division.
Mitratech For Sale?
Reuters reported today that Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan was exploring a $4B sale of Mitratech. For more information, see their posting here.
2024 Holiday Greeting
In 2024, GLE again has made a donation to World Central Kitchen. We suggest their James Beard Award-Winning Cookbook, “The World Central Kitchen Cookbook: Feeding Hope, Feeding Humanity” by Chef Jose Andres as a gift consideration this holiday season.
Happy 30th Birthday Legal Ebilling
The legal ebilling industry was born on November 28, 1994, when I started as the first employee at what later became known as TyMetrix.
TyMetrix founder Bob Heinemann and an insurance GC believed that legal invoices contained information that was impossible to distill because of how it was presented, leading to little understanding of the services provided by outside counsel. They believed there had to be a better way, and I was hired to help turn the idea into a business.
We viewed ebilling as more than just a pipe to receive and pay invoices. We believed that combining billing data with matter information would create rich reports to provide insight into how different approaches to handling a matter can result in different outcomes.
Bob fostered a collaborative environment and our early team members (Steve Zielinski, Nancy Doyle, Scott Holliday and Frank Mikulak, among others) were key to our success. I am enormously proud of the decisions we made with the product in those early days: we created functionality that is foundational to legal ebilling today.
So happy 30th birthday legal ebilling, and my thanks to all who contributed to moving the industry ahead over the last 30 years.
New Products in Legal Ebilling
At ILTACon 2024, I found some new products available with functionality for different purposes in legal ebilling.
Hercules AI is offering a new product called Verify that is designed to assist with Outside Counsel Compliance. So slick. Very next generation. It knocked my socks off, and I sent 6 people over to look at the product. You can learn more here: https://hercules.ai/verify/.
The week prior to the conference I received a Google Alert mentioning FulcrumGT’s Salvo product. No one on the LEDES Board had heard of it, and it was the one product that I was in search of more information on as I headed to the conference. Salvo is a new entrant in the Ebilling Administration tool market, competing against Elite eBillingHub and Aderant BillBlast. This market has long been in need of additional products, and now one exists. Interestingly, they state, “The solution can provide real-time updates across all vendor sites” which I think is a differentiator. You can learn more here: https://legacysite.fulcrumgt.com/products/salvo/.
FulcrumGT also is offering a collaborative ELM system called RapidX. It is worthy of a look from any law department or insurance organization wanting to implement legal ebilling or to change vendor systems. The system is similarly available to law firms that would like to better collaborate with non-ebilling clients. You can learn more here: https://fulcrumgt.com/.
Finally, I wanted to mention seeing Oddr’s Invoice to Cash Platform. I have seen this product at a couple shows now, and still am struck by their creative solution for invoice/collections/payments. I am not aware of any other product aimed at this particular segment of the “problem” with legal ebilling. It is not unexpected that they are picking up traction in the marketplace. To learn more: https://www.oddr.com/.