Litera acquires contract analysis company
Litera has announced the acquisition of Kira Systems (“Kira”), a developer of machine learning contract review and analysis software. This follows the recent purchase of Australia’s DocsCorp and its suite of software and services for document professionals who use enterprise content management systems.
Since 2019, Litera has seen significant organic growth and completed 12 acquisitions, more than trebling the size of the business.
Founded in 2011 and based in Toronto, Canada, Kira offers contract analysis software to help helping lawyers to analyse more documents with greater efficiency and accuracy.
Kira’s patented, award-winning machine learning technology, quickly extracts concepts and data points and comes with over 1200 built-in provision models. The company claims to be the dominant player in contract analysis software for law firms, used by a majority of the AmLaw 100 firms, and 18 of the top 25 law firms in the 2020 M&A league tables.
On a typical M&A deal, lawyers are only reviewing a small set of contracts because it traditionally has not been economically feasible to do more. This selective process inherently increases risk in the deal, and important information can be overlooked. With Kira, lawyers can review more contracts efficiently and accurately to mitigate risks and provide more significant insights into transactions.
Avaneesh Marwaha, Litera CEO, said in a statement that the acquisition would “allow us to include advanced machine learning workflows into our Transaction Management platform. Providing lawyers with significantly expanded workflows to manage more aspects of the deal management process of higher quality. We are also incredibly impressed by the Kira team and leadership, whose expertise will be a strong addition to the Litera family. Overall, Kira enables us to provide total diligence for the transaction and deal management lifecycle.”
“Litera is the perfect partner for Kira. They have a deep understanding of the legal market globally and share our vision that technology can transform the contract review process. Litera has achieved ubiquity in the legal market for its Drafting products. We believe this acquisition will ensure Kira achieves ubiquity in the due diligence review process, as well as provide a welcome home for our customers and employees.” said Noah Waisberg, CEO and Co-Founder. As part of the transaction, Noah will continue as a strategic advisor to Litera.
Avaneesh Marwaha will speak further about the acquisition in his CEO Executive Briefing on August 19th, 10 a.m. CT.
As part of the overall transaction, Kira Systems is spinning off a new company, Zuva, which will continue to advance the state of the art of machine learning for business documents and will be focused on delivering tools that enable the world’s businesses to know what’s in their contracts. Noah Waisberg will lead the new company as CEO, Kira Co-Founder and CTO Dr. Alexander Hudek will be a strategic advisor and board director.
Zuva will officially launch and make its first product announcement in September 2021.