BeyondRecognition Acquires Equity in DW Legal

Global News

16
Sep
2014

Editor

In unusually structured deal, BR licenses technology to DW and receives equity plus license and usage fees

John Martin, CEO and Founder of BeyondRecognition, LLC, (“BR”) a Houston-based technology company providing visual document classification and attribute extraction capabilities to Fortune 500 companies, and Mark Willis, CEO and President of the Willis Group which owns DW Legal, a leading provider of managed review, litigation readiness and e-discovery consulting, announced today that BR and the Willis Group had reached agreement to further solidify their working relationship.

Under the agreement, BR acquires significant equity in and licenses its technology to DW Legal, and DW Legal pays an annual licensing fee and ongoing processing fees.

Martin said, “Our relationship with DW Legal is a key part of our growth strategy of establishing enduring relationships with partners who have special expertise in particular market segments. DW Legal has 30 years’ experience in managed review, litigation readiness, and, more recently, e-discovery, and is uniquely qualified to leverage our document classification and attribute extraction capabilities in those markets. We are quite pleased that this agreement further strengthens our relationship with them.”

Willis noted that, “BR’s visual document classification and attribute extraction technology is enormously useful when processing documents involved in litigation, regulatory proceedings, or M&A activities. This is the only technology that is equally adept at classifying scanned paper records as classifying native electronic files, and, even better, it can scale to handle the largest collections. Our ability to use BR technology to classify and review large numbers of documents significantly reduces the time required and permits far more thorough review and analysis, so we are obviously quite excited to be able to provide these new capabilities for our clients.”

DW Legal is a member of the Willis Group which has been included in the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing U.S. companies for three years. Michael Willis, Chairman of the Willis Group, said, “All of our companies involve major components of business services, technology solutions, and human capital services, and we see BeyondRecognition as a real game changer in terms of lowering the resources required to manage and analyze documents. BR provides a real competitive advantage, enabling us to provide faster, more thorough services in a variety of setting.”

Mark Willis agreed, saying, “The term ’disruptive’ is often overused, but we see BR as bringing truly disruptive technology to several markets. We’re starting with managed review, but there are other markets like large-volume document translation where BR’s ability to process large volumes of documents while tracking all the glyphs, words, sentences, and paragraphs in them will enable us to provide unprecedented levels of accuracy and short project turn-around times while providing human-quality translation at a much lower price point.”