Legal tech company Litera acquires Kira Systems

With its contract review technology, Kira helps lawyers analyze documents faster and more accurately. The software is currently used by the majority of the AmLaw 100 law firms and 18 of the top 25 law firms.

“We have grown steadily over the past few years and this acquisition is a big one for us,” said Marwaha.

As part of the deal, Kira will spin off a new company called Zuva that will commercialize the company’s artificial intelligence. Its first product will be unveiled in September.

“This technology will focus on developing software that can help other software vendors and provide them with analysis that may be difficult for them to create themselves,” said Marwaha.

Kira, founded in 2011, is the twelfth company Litera has acquired in the past two years, Marwaha said.

Litera itself is the product of numerous acquisitions and private equity deals. The company’s roots go back to Downers Grove-based Microsystems, which was founded in 1995 and manufactured software for creating, editing, formatting and proofreading documents. In 2016, Los Angeles-based private equity firm K1 acquired Capital Microsystems and appointed Marwaha as CEO. The following year, Microsystems relocated its offices to downtown Chicago.

Since then, Microsystems has acquired other technology companies, including Litera, which initiated the name change, as well as Workshare, Doxly and Clocktimizer.

“The first few companies we acquired were all from the late 90s or early 2000s, so we brought some old brands together, kind of revitalized them and made them more strategic – they felt like startups,” said Marwaha.

Later, in 2019, the private equity investor Hg took over the majority of the company and continued the acquisition tour.

Litera is now focused on developing legal workflow and workspace technologies, works with over 15,000 customers including DLA Piper and Latham & Watkins, and is well on its way to achieving $ 150 million in sales this year said Marwaha.

“We help our law firm clients improve their loyalty by helping them deliver quality work on time and on budget,” said Marwaha.

With the recent acquisition of Kira, Litera now employs approximately 800 people worldwide, including 200 in the Chicago area, where most of the executive team is based. Additional offices are in London, New York and now Toronto.

Chicago has grown into a center for legal tech. Relativity, which was founded as KCura by Andrew Sieja in 2006 and has become a dominant player in the legal software space, sold a stake in the company earlier this year to Silicon Valley private equity firm Silver Lake, which owns the company with a value of Valued at $ 3.6 billion.

Now iManage, founded in Chicago in 1995, makes artificial intelligence-based document and email management software used by the legal industry, as well as accounting and financial services. The company, which was previously owned by HP and emerged from the tech giant in 2015, employs more than 750 people, according to its website. The company says its software is used by 2,500 law firms.

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