Following K1’s acquisition in August of Litera and The Sackett Group to add to its Microsystems and XRef stable, the board has decided that the combined company will be called Litera Microsystems, with former Microsystems CEO and president Avaneesh Marwaha at the helm as CEO, as the company also unveils its product roadmap.
Paul Domnick, who joined Litera as president in 2014, will be a senior leader on the executive team, but his precise role has yet to be announced.
While Litera Microsystems has stressed that it will support all products going forward, Microsystems 3BClean and Litera LexPro will ultimately be sunsetted because they overlap with Litéra’s Metadact/Metadact-E and Contract Companion, which will be the focus of new features and enhancements.
The company said it will continue to support 3BClean with maintenance updates while LexPro will be maintained for existing customers. Marwaha (pictured) told the Orange Rag: “Our hope is that customers move over seamlessly and our goal is to have little to no impact on the customer.”
While overlap has been identified between The Sackett Group’s Forte and Litéra’s Innova platforms, Litera Microsystems said it believes they offer sufficiently different value to customers, and both will be developed going forward.
The merger and key decisions are being driven by Los Angeles headquartered private equity house K1, which has invested $100m on the acquisition of the four companies.
Marwaha, who reports to a K1 board, said: “We felt that both names have strong recognition in the market place. With our new name we feel like we push the idea of the customer personal touch that Litera is known for and the back-office support of Microsystems: we didn’t want customers to feel like they were losing something.”
Marwaha added that the company is not yet in a position to announce the remaining senior leadership positions and will not be revealing who is on the board.
K1 has engineered the four-way merger to significantly shake up the document creation and review market. Marwaha said: “For me personally it’s a great opportunity to change how the legal industry operates with document and software and really focus on creating a software organisation known for high quality work and helping the customer with training. We want to be full service, deeply embedded in the workflow, and first and foremost an organisation that listens to its customers.”
