Litera has acquired Office & Dragons for an undisclosed amount. Litera says this will boost its LegalTech offering by adding automation and generative AI to drafting and editing documents. Office & Dragons claims that its solution saves 85-97% of the time required to edit and work with documents. For lawyers, this is a significant time saving, and one that allows them to focus more on billable tasks.
Samuel Smolkin, Founder and CEO of Office & Dragons, said, “We are thrilled to join forces with Litera. 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.
“With integrations spanning Compare, Kira, Transact, and beyond, we aim to make Office & Dragons an essential part of every lawyer’s toolkit—helping them save hours of repetitive work, focus on higher-value tasks, and improve their quality of life.”
Who are Office & Dragons?
Office & Dragons (O&D) describes itself as “A plug-and-play platform that eliminates repetitive document work without setup, templates or code.” Its focus is on accelerating work for lawyers without the need for programmers. It uses a mix of automation and generative AI to streamline workflows.
It ingests sets of work and uses that to determine how to lay out and structure multiple types of documents. Additionally, it makes it easy to do mass edits across suites of documents, including name changes and changing clauses. The latter is extremely useful when doing mass updates of contracts. Its primary markets are Private Equity, Finance, Employment, Real Estate and Litigation.
The company has had one seed funding round back in 2021 for an undisclosed amount. What is not clear is whether this acquisition will see Cur8 Capital exit the company or now exchange its holding in O&D for one in Litera.
How does this fit into Litera?
Litera is another LegalTech firm focused on workflow, collaboration and data management. It has been through 13 funding rounds raising over $400 million. To date, it has made 17 acquisitions, the majority of which have come since 2021.
O&D is its 18th acquisition, and it will be interesting to see what happens next. Will the technology be absorbed into other products or become a new offering to customers? Is there a patent to be applied for based on the work the O&D team have done?
What is interesting is that the whole O&D team are due to join Litera. As they are based in the UK, will they move to Litera’s London office or continue to operate independently? How long before Litera’s partners offer the O&D solution, and what will happen to the O&D sales channel?
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
There is a big push around AI and the legal industry. It seems that every week another LegalTech firm announces a new solution using some form of AI to speed up work. There is no surprise in that because all professional services industries rely on billable hours. If AI can reduce the mundane overhead and free people up for income-generating work, customers will look at it.
What is interesting here is that after a quiet 2023 and, so far, 2024, Litera is back on the acquisition trail. It will be interesting to see how it absorbs O&D and where it fits into the Litera product line. The company already has six products for document drafting and two for workflow. It also has its own active Litera Labs team that continues to register patents for new technology.
Based on that, this looks like a technology rather than a customer or talent acquisition to fill a gap while the Labs team delivers its own solution.
