We spoke to Avaneesh Marwaha, CEO of Litera, and Gary Young, CEO of Peppermint Technology, about the driving forces behind the acquisition and what customers can expect now.
On 6 February, Litera announced that it was acquiring leading UK Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV) for law firms Peppermint Technology. Peppermint’s primary go-to-market offering is its client relationship management module, however its CX365 platform combines CRM, ERM, matter management, and case management.
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We spoke to Litera’s CEO Avaneesh Marwaha and Peppermint’s CEO about what the key drivers were for the acquisition; why it’s a good product fit; what the product strategy is going forward; whether all of Peppermint’s people will come on board; how the acquisition will impact the future of Litera’s Salesforce CRM Upper Sigma; and how the acquisition will impact Peppermint’s growth the in the US.
Thank you both for speaking with Legal IT Insider, tell us what the primary drivers were for the acquisition?
Avaneesh Marwaha (AM): “For Litera, being really deep in a workflow is pretty important to our belief system. A few years ago, when we acquired Foundation, we saw the opportunity to really expand business development and workflow management. And as we continue to sell and deploy and get users on Foundation and see how they use it, we recognize that if we have more of that ecosystem, the experience just gets better and so even a couple of years ago, it would have been ideal for Litera to be all in on Microsoft, but unfortunately Gary wasn’t ready or looking for an opportunity. When the business was available and they were interested in talking to potential partners, we jumped at it. We’ve been having some ongoing reviews of our current ecosystem and obviously in the last two years, Microsoft has become even more compelling. We didn’t want to compete head-to-head with Microsoft, we want to leverage everything that they have in their ecosystem. This was a perfect chance for us to have a conversation and luckily, we came out a successful bidder and were able to close the transaction.”
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Gary Young (GY): “We’ve had a lot of success in our space over the last few years and then laterally expanding into the US and having some success there. But now we’re getting access to the Litera broader portfolio and the portfolios really complement each other, so we’ve got a much broader portfolio now to take to these very large enterprises. Litera builds and buys, but we’ve always just built. We can accelerate quite a bit by now being part of that broader, bigger business. The commitment to Microsoft doesn’t change, in fact as Avaneesh said, it’s even more so. I think it’s really beneficial to Microsoft because we’ve got a much bigger business now, which is going to be very Microsoft focused. We’re still legally focused, and again we’re very similar in that respect; really focusing on law and legal and now large law globally. We’ve been stretching out into Australia and beyond but again, we’ve got a springboard to do that with Litera’s brand and resources, so it just accelerates our strategy. It’s a really good fit from a product perspective, from a market perspective, geographical perspective and cultural perspective, and that’s important to both Avaneesh and I that there’s that cultural fit.”
Why is it a good product fit?
AM: “So we’ve been, as a product business, developing a viewpoint of how to make an impact on partners and managing partners of law firms, and to do that we felt like Outlook is the place to go in. Peppermint’s been on the same trajectory; building a really strong product called Connect that resides in Outlook and draws data out from their ecosystem back to the partners and users. So for us, it accelerates our opportunity to move data and bring it out at the right place at the right time.
“Gary and I as leaders believe that the teams can put together really strong integrations quickly and that will show the market pretty quickly why this came together and why it makes sense. I think there’s a true 1 + 1 equals not three but five or six.”
GY: “If you think about the spine of this, the bottom is the data and the client information, the matter information and our platform as well, and you can start to bring all that data together. You’ve then got the applications, the workflows and the processes in the middle. And then at the top, you’ve got that user experience, which we just talked about, using Connect and another means. Between the two of us, we’re going to own that spine now.”
How will Peppermint fit together with Foundation in particular?
AM: “The key to long-term law firm success, especially in the day and age of GenAI that we’re in today, is how do you unlock your experience faster and how do you use that experience data at the right place? And so, we can bridge the gap from the start through to completion of a matter and harness the experience that matters back into the ecosystem, putting it all under one visual layer. I think it’s pretty compelling and the more data we can put into Foundation, the better it is in the long run. So understanding how you interact with clients, how you interact with prospects, and storing all that, harnessing it for future work, I think that is what partners and managing partners and chairs of law firms really want to uncover. Then we can drive more predictive workflows, more predictive outcomes, more GenAI, and we can do a lot more in the ecosystem”
Peppermint has all sorts of functionality including client engagement, practice management and document management, will it continue to be mostly focused on CRM or is this the start of a wider focus?
AM: “This really kickstarts and boosts the client engagement and CRM angle in experience management of a law firm. Practice management and matter management is a cold no. We’ve all been trying practice management in various ways around the world and in certain markets. It does really well in the UK, mainland Europe, and APAC, and those are places where you see partnerships and practice leads enforcing the usage of practice management and matter management. In the US, it’s a little more bifurcated, but we think as a comprehensive solution, there’s a more compelling offering to give.
“For DMS, what is exciting for us is to be that bridge immediately between the systems that exist today, whether it’s iManage or NetDocuments or SharePoint, and say ‘we know today there’s collaboration happening between the ecosystems; we understand people are using Teams. We know that if you collaborate, you’re pinging SharePoint and so being able to protect, govern and maximize that is priority number one.’ The long term view of DMS is ever evolving. But today I think there’s a real strong story around how do you give someone the opportunity to work in SharePoint and iManage at the same time and give and give it a unified workflow, and that’s where we’re at today.”
GY: “Our strategy today is, although we’ve been working with Microsoft on this next gen DMS, we integrate with iManage, we integrate with NetDocuments, and obviously we have our own SharePoint offering. Ultimately, it is about that experience and connection and whether that user is reaching into a document in iManage or reaching into a document in SharePoint or NetDocs it doesn’t matter, to some extent. And then we see huge, huge opportunity in that CRM/ERM experience management e-mail marketing space, bringing that whole ecosystem together between the two of us. There’s nothing like it in the market under one roof.”
What does the acquisition mean in terms of people coming on board? Will there be a role for Gary?
GY: “Everybody’s coming on board. We did the deal in in in record time, which was a testament to both teams and advisors and everybody’s coming over. We’re 100 people, so it’s not like it’s that big a number, but everybody’s important to Litera, no matter what position they have in the company.
“Obviously it’s early days, but in the conversations we’re having, the teams are getting along great. All of my team are going across and everybody’s focused on the new company and the customers of course and continuing to do what we’re doing, so to some extent it’s as business as usual.
“My focus is on making that go well, that’s my prime focus, for the customers who I have come to know and love over many years, as well as the team. I want this to be a success and these things don’t happen just once you’ve done the deal, it doesn’t happen by chance or by luck, you’ve got to work hard at it. I’m absolutely committed to making sure that this works for everybody for as long as it takes.”
One thing that has caused a lot of attention is Upper Sigma: what’s the future of the Salesforce CRM you acquired in 2021?
AM: “Upper Sigma is still supported and will be supported. We are talking to each customer, figuring out what they want and we’re going to be super flexible in that approach and make sure that they feel adequate coverage.
“We are focused on growing our peppermint CRM and the Microsoft tech stack. Salesforce is a great CRM, but not always the easiest to engage with. We’ve seen them in pharmaceuticals go around all of their partners and sell direct at some point and legal is no different. And so we had potentially two Salesforce CRMs in the marketplace because Salesforce was going direct. And it’s a business problem to solve every day.
“I’ve always had a belief that Microsoft is where Litera has long term success to be the front end and to make that investment super valuable for law firms. And Peppermint does that for us and continues that belief system going forward. Connect today can sit on top of other CRMs as well.
“We believe we can bring some value to our Upper Sigma customers as well with Connect and maybe in the long run, they’ll find a new home in the Peppermint ecosystem, but for today, nothing changes for our existing customers and we continue to invest and support that product line, but we will have conversations and say look, this is what just happened. What can we do? What would you like to do and how can we support you for the next one, two, three, five years? We want to keep you in the in the Litera world because we just believe data inside one ecosystem is better than in multiple fractions.”
Gary, Peppermint has been growing in America organically, presumably this will really accelerate that?
GY: “Yes that was also a part of the upside and the rationale for Peppermint going with Litera.Apart from the UK obviously, and bolstering our efforts here, it does accelerate what we’re doing in the US, where we have 10 people. It’s the biggest legal market in the world and we’ve done pretty well over the last few years to win some pretty impressive clients, but we want to be winning every client and we now have the coverage and the scale to do so, along with the product, the platform, and the resources. We’ve now just got a much bigger engine in the car to go faster.”
