Litera Microsystems acquires Workshare, creating a leading supplier of document drafting technology

Global News

10
Jul
2019

Editor

Litera Microsystems today announces its acquisition of Workshare in a move that underlines the company's focus on providing a seamless drafting experience for users across best-of-breed technologies.

The deal will enable firms which currently use both suppliers to consolidate their relationships, simplify the process of updating software and rely on a single, world class, support team for the full suite.

Both companies have been involved in key legal technology innovation over the last two decades and are a natural fit to drive the next wave of change in the industry.

Workshare is a recognized innovator in delivering productivity tools for over 20 years, with core products used for document comparison, protection and sharing. In addition, Workshare’s new Transact platform has been transforming transaction management for many top tier law firms.

Litera Microsystems successfully merged four companies over the course of 2016 and 2017, and the Chicago-headquartered company has gone on to secure over 50,000 users of Litera Desktop, which provides a single point of access to its full suite of drafting products.  

Earlier this year, Litera Microsystems partnered with Hg, a specialist private equity investor focused on software and service businesses based in London, Munich and New York. Litera Microsystems was able to leverage Hg’s network and knowledge of the global legal software market to help drive this integration with Workshare, adding further products to the suite, for the benefit of existing and future customers.

Avaneesh Marwaha, Litera Microsystems CEO said, “The legal industry has an increasing interest in finding end-to-end solutions rather than integrating and managing multiple products from multiple vendors. Workshare has been part of the drafting ecosystem for many years and many of our customers are Workshare customers too. We firmly believe that they are better served by bringing the organizations together.”

Michael Garrett, CEO of Workshare added, “We see this as a great opportunity to build on the strengths of each organization to better serve the market. Litera Microsystems and Hg have impressed us with their vision of a single supplier to improve the efficiency, productivity, and security of the document lifecycle and we’re looking forward to being part of that future.”

“As far as I’m concerned, the more consolidation of top suppliers we see, the better,” commented Matt Peers, Global Chief Operating Officer at Linklaters.  “Our focus at Linklaters is to provide our lawyers with the technology they need to focus on their clients and deliver the highest value work.  Increased integration between these technologies, especially when we can source from a single supplier, is key to helping us keep up with the pace of change and demand the industry requires. We have been using products from both Litera Microsystems and Workshare for years and this combination is a very positive step from our perspective.”