A boardroom can be seen in an office building in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA, May 24, 2021. REUTERS / Andrew Kelly
- The contract software company Kira will outsource the new company Zuva as part of the deal
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(Reuters) – Litera will acquire contract review and analysis software company Kira Systems in its twelfth legal technology acquisition in recent years, the companies said Tuesday.
Document technology company Litera will buy Toronto-based Kira for an undisclosed amount to enhance its transaction management platform with Kira’s machine learning capabilities, Litera CEO Avaneesh Marwaha said in a statement.
“Kira enables us to carefully design the entire transaction and deal management lifecycle,” said Marwaha.
Venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, which invested $ 50 million in Kira in August 2018, will continue its investment in Kira and become a minority investor in Litera, the companies said. The private equity company Hg, which Litera bought from K1 Investment Management in 2019, will retain its majority stake.
Litera, which claims to have more than 15,000 law firms and corporate clients, has taken over several other companies in the past two years. Other deals in 2021 so far include the budgeting and pricing platform Clocktimizer in April and the software company DocsCorp for document productivity in March.
The deal between two well-known players from the legal tech sector is the latest transaction in the booming industry. Legal tech firms of all sizes have received funding from venture capital and private equity firms this year – just this week, legal tech startup LawVu launched a Series A funding round led by Insight. E-discovery provider CS Disco Inc and online legal services company LegalZoom both made public debuts, while other companies like Litera have taken the M&A route.
“Litera is the perfect partner for Kira,” said Noah Waisberg, CEO and co-founder of Kira, in a statement. “They have a deep understanding of the global legal market and share our vision that technology can transform the contract review process.”
The transaction will “ensure that Kira is ubiquitous in the due diligence process and provides a welcome home for our customers and employees,” he said.
Waisberg, a former employee of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, founded Kira in 2010 together with the computer scientist Alexander Hudek. The company’s machine learning technology enables lawyers to efficiently review contracts and mitigate risk, the announcement said.
Waisberg will be Litera’s strategic advisor. He will also lead Zuva, a new company that Kira will spin off as part of the transaction beginning in September. Zuva will use artificial intelligence in new products for the enterprise market that “enable the world’s companies to know what is in their contracts,” the companies said.
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Sara Remember
Sara Merken reports on privacy and data security as well as legal business, including legal innovations and key players in the legal services industry. Reach her at [email protected]
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