Xerox’s acquisition of Lateral Data adds significantly to the range of solutions which Xerox Litigation Services can offer to its clients, and provides further evidence that the eDiscovery market is fast consolidating into fewer hands.

The announcement is here and Legal Technology News has a helpful commentary here.  The significance of this acquisition lies in the very different markets addressed by the hosted environments of Xerox Litigation Services and the in-house users for which Lateral Data’s Viewpoint was designed.  By “different markets” I do not necessarily mean that there is no overlap between the client bases of the two companies – indeed, according to LTN, Xerox  were first introduced to Lateral Data and Viewpoint by someone who was a client of both companies.

Xerox has its web-based review platform, OmniX and its document classification tool CategoriX; many clients will need these hosted services for some cases but not for others, and Lateral Data fills the gap. The plan, it seems, is to keep the two products distinct except where obvious overlaps or connections can be exploited. Randy Burroughs, managing director of XLS says: “Clients can choose a full service cloud-based approach, a do-it-yourself on premise solution or a customized combination of both.”

XLS has always emphasised that it is a services and consulting business as well as technology company. The acquisition gives ample opportunity to expand all these offerings in an enterprise eDiscovery market which Xerox estimates will grow to $1.6 billion by 2013.

I aim to see Randy Burroughs in London next week, and hope to have more behind-the-scenes information then.

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