When Alma Asay was a lawyer at Gibson Dunn, she developed spreadsheets to enable the firm to manage complex cases. She founded Allegory in 2012 to develop a much more sophisticated way of handling all the information acquired or developed during major cases and to make that available to users. Integreon has now acquired Allegory.

Already globally entrenched as a provider of eDiscovery and related services to legal departments and law firms, Integreon has been steadily moving towards the wider goal of supporting lawyers across the whole life of a case, bringing advanced technology and the industry expertise to enhance the efficiency and profitability of its clients.

In October Integreon announced a technology partnership with Kira to deliver AI-powered contract review services to its clients for including contract lifecycle management platform migration, post-merger integration and regulatory review.

Integreon CEO Rob Rowe said of that deal:

Incorporating Kira’s cutting-edge machine learning into our legal services offerings allows us to deliver more efficient due diligence reviews, contract reviews, migrations and analyses. Our partnership speaks to how we help organisations realize greater efficiency and profitability than what they can achieve on their own.

The acquisition of Allegory is a further step towards Integreon’s ambition to become a full-scale litigation management and discovery partner for those responsible for the management of litigation and other matters.

Alma Asay becomes Chief Innovation Officer, Legal Solutions at Integreon, working with clients to bring the right mixture of technology and skills to solving their business problems.

There is an interesting Forbes article here headed Integreon & Allegory: Anatomy Of An Acquisition about Allegory and about its path from genesis to acquisition. The interview is with both Alma Asay and Bob Rowe, CEO of Integreon, and contains some useful suggestions for other entrepreneurs developing solutions, both generally and for the relatively narrow legal technology market. Bob Rowe talks about the need for lawyers to have “real-time access to all of the evidence and pleadings in a case on a single platform to facilitate in-context analysis in collaboration.”

Alma Asay has some suggestions for entrepreneurs, of which the most useful, to my eye, is “get to know everyone “. This is not, she said, about “having a high LinkedIn connections count” but about “getting to know people in the industries in which you’re working”. Opportunities may pass you by unnoticed – “totally pass you by if you’re so set on a particular plan that you’re not ready for a curve ball”.

That curve ball may be the chance of an unforeseen partnership or acquisition. It may be a new demand from clients for which existing services offer no obvious solution. Integreon has a wide existing client base; the combination of its existing fire-power, its Allegory acquisition and Alma Asay’s entrepreneurial spirit should take Integreon to new opportunities within existing clients and to whole new markets.

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