If the hardest thing in marketing is to launch an entirely new start-up business, perhaps the second is to launch a new name and brand for a long-established business. That was the task of Beth Fritts, SVP and Managing Director of Conduent Legal and Compliance Solutions in a presentation at Legaltech. She did it very well.

The vast Xerox Corporation has been split into two. Conduent covers a wide range of business processes and industry verticals, offering (among other things) the application of automation to transaction-intensive processes whether directly for clients or to enable Conduent’s clients in turn to enable their clients. Conduent Legal and Compliance Solutions offers eDiscovery, compliance, analytics and similar functions to corporate legal departments and law firms.

There are obvious advantages in starting a new business with established clients, cash in the bank and a revenue stream, and Beth Fritts emphasised the benefits of combining this established position with an agility that was not possible under Xerox. The clients are businesses in which new demands appear and new opportunities open constantly, and the smaller, neater Conduent is now better placed to react to new trends (“smaller” relative to Xerox, that is – Conduent is a big corporation by any other standard). This ambition is supported by research laboratories in the US and in India and by follow-the-sun support and managed review services based in India.

Conduent’s stable recurring revenue allows it to invest in growth businesses like legal, which Conduent sees as one likely to benefit from the kind of efficiencies which Conduent’s services can bring.

Beth Fritts identified three particular areas which Conduent focuses on – litigation solutions, managed services, and compliance and risk. For discovery, Conduent’s Legal and Compliance Solutions are platform agnostic, with proprietary applications, OmniX Hosted Review and Viewpoint All-in-One Platform inherited from Xerox plus Relativity Hosted Review. It has brought new analytical tools like Brainspace into its toolset and offers case-based and client-based analytics, developing workflows as required and with an emphasis on reporting and transparency.

All these tools and services are supported by what Beth Fritts described as “massively parallel processing” which take hours rather than days to process data, and by teams with relevant expertise of both the technology and the subject matter – one advantage of Conduent’s size is that if, for example, a matter includes some aspect of the armed forces, than the review team can include people with military expertise.

The heading “Compliance and Risk” implies more than the retrospective review and analysis expected in discovery, and extends into prediction and risk assessment. If, for example, a company is launching a new drug, it wants to know about potential issues as they arise, or even before they arise because, as Beth Fritts put it, they “want to catch it before somebody else does”. Conduent’s combination of scale, technology and expertise makes it possible to bring benefits like this to its clients.

Conduent’s combination of established history and new agility is impressive. I am usually chary of making predictions after this sort of launch, but I’m prepared to bet that you will hear much more of Conduent Legal and Compliance Solutions in the coming year.

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