No stranger to making strategic market moves to enhance its capabilities, Litera has added another acquisition to its growing portfolio of legal tech solutions, this time with the aim of eliminating repetitive document work.
On Tuesday, Litera announced it has acquired mass document drafting and editing platform Office & Dragons. Capitalizing on Office & Dragons’ automation and generative AI capabilities for streamlining document workflows, the acquisition will augment Litera’s offerings by adding "easy to learn, time-saving tools to help law firms power through hundreds of legal documents without complex coding or specially crafted templates,” the press release stated. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“We are thrilled to join forces with Litera,” Office & Dragons Founder and CEO Samuel Smolkin said in the release. “The entire O&D team will be coming on board, and we’re excited about the opportunities to grow our platform with Litera’s extensive resources and complementary products.”
Office & Dragons currently serves legal professionals in a variety of practice areas, including private equity, finance, employment, real estate, and litigation. Offering mass editing and document generation capabilities, Office & Dragons handles work in both templates and bespoke documents. Combining those offerings with its own will now allow Litera to “empower law firms to generate, edit, and redline documents faster and more accurately than ever, streamlining workflows for attorneys across diverse specialties,” according to the release.
"I've been so impressed by Sam [Smolkin]’s understanding of the market, involvement in the industry, and passion for building strong solutions for the legal tech community,” Avaneesh Marwaha, who was recently reinstated as CEO of Litera after a two-year absence, said in the release. “This acquisition is a prime example of Litera’s ongoing commitment to expand our portfolio with mission-critical tools that integrate with native attorney workflows.”
Inside the Office & Dragons Acquisition
For Smolkin, the questions of why Litera and why now largely come down to his desire to scale up and better serve customers, he told Legaltech Hub. “We've grown a lot over the past two years, really accelerated, and we've done that with a really lean team. We were lucky in that we hired great people and were able to punch above our weight in what we were able to build and what we were able to accomplish in terms of customers and sales and revenues,” he said.
However, the company was at a point where, to keep growing, there were essentially three options. They could do it organically, at the risk of being too slow, they could take on external VC funding, which would mean faster growth but dilution of control, or they could find a strategic partner. Smolkin opted for the latter, specifically choosing Litera because of its familiarity with Office & Dragons and the opportunity to grow on Litera’s platform.
“The conversation developed and came to a point where we felt that this partnership just made the most sense for our customers, for our team, for our shareholders, and we're really excited about what we can do now within the larger Litera platform,” Smolkin said. Office & Dragons will integrate with Litera tools such as Compare, Kira, and Transact, while complementing tools like Litera Draft.
"All of our customers are also Litera customers. By and large, they all have Litera Draft and they have Office & Dragons, and until today, they've been pretty different use cases,” with Draft focusing on actions within a single Word document and Office & Dragons being optimized for bulk document work, Smolkin explained to LTH. “I think, in the future, it presents an interesting opportunity to do good things together.”
Additionally, Smolkin said he’s excited about what the acquisition means for current Office & Dragons customers. “The whole team's coming on board. We're all really excited about what the opportunity represents for existing customers—they're still going to be working with us, and a better-resourced, bigger, better version of us over time, but still the same people they've always been working with,” he said. “We're the Office & Dragons division of Litera, so to speak.” For example, support tickets will still be handled quickly by the same people who have always handled them.
The big differences will be positive ones, he explained—additional resources, including more engineers, will be “a big boost” to how quickly they can develop and release features.
“Plus, in terms of accelerating go-to-market, you really couldn't ask for a better partner than Litera,” Smolkin concluded. “This is a huge step for making O&D part of every lawyer's toolkit, which is what I've always wanted to achieve with it.”
With the purchase of Office & Dragons, Litera is nearing 20 legal tech acquisitions since its founding. It also marks the company’s second acquisition in 2024, following the July acquisition of FileTrail.
