2020 kicks off with another piece of consolidation in the legal services / eDiscovery market, as Legility and Inventus combine. Legility is the acquiring company but its CEO, Barry Dark, says that it sees “the end-result as a merger between two market leaders”. An article by Sarah Brown of Inventus tells the story here.

The combined company, to be called Legility, brings skills and markets which both overlap and are complementary. The clients of 2020 work in global markets – Gartner’s prediction of about five years ago was that non-US markets for discovery-related products and services would grow at a faster rate than the US market, partly because they started relatively late, and partly because the economies of non-US regions would accelerate more quickly. That led Inventus to its close focus on the UK and Europe and on AsiaPac as well as the US, with its CEO, Paul Mankoo, based in London.

The HQ of the combined business will be in Nashville, Tennessee. London and Chicago, where Inventus is based, will remain significant centres, and Paul Mankoo continues as a key member of the executive team.

The combined companies have more than 500 employees across 20 international offices and 8 international data centres. Increased size brings the opportunity to do new things as well as to perform existing functions on a bigger scale. Paul Mankoo talks of “an enormous opportunity to enhance and expand the types of services we deliver to our clients.”

The commonality between the two companies lies in providing technology-enabled services for the legal operations market. Viewed from the beginning of 2020, there is no obvious end to the potential for expansion in this market.

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