At the recent Clio Cloud Conference, someone pointed at the NetDocuments and asked me, “what are they doing here?” I pointed out that NetDocuments does integrate with Clio, but my companion responded, “sure, but… what do they really get out of this?” The point was that the Clio conference, with a primary (though not exclusive!) focus on small and solo law firms, didn’t seem like a great growth play for NetDocuments given the loyalty the small firm world has to competing DMS solution.
That offhand conversation came flooding back to me when NetDocuments announced earlier today that it had acquired Worldox, the venerable DMS product with a strong presence in the small- and mid-sized legal market.
Rebecca Sattin, Co-CEO and CIO at Worldox commented, “Industry trends among law firms and legal teams reflect a prevailing cloud-first strategy and the desire to future-proof their organizations with platforms that can deliver a wide variety of tools, seamlessly connect to other technologies, and scale with their needs. NetDocuments’ proven ability to support these capabilities coupled with their commitment to innovating new, customer-inspired solutions made the combining of our organizations a win-win for customers, partners, employees, and the legal industry as a whole.”
Worldox customers will be transitioned to NetDocuments “at their own pace,” according to NetDocuments CEO Josh Baxter. In the meantime, Worldox customers will continue to have uninterrupted service. With customers both on-prem and in the cloud, one expects that Worldox’s cloud subscribers will transition to NetDocuments faster.
The last time you might have seen Worldox in the news was when its longtime president was arrested on child porn charges. However, this had nothing to do with this deal, which was already in the works at the time.
Meanwhile, the last time we talked about NetDocuments, the company had just unveiled its PatternBuilder product, a no-code solution for lawyers and legal teams to build automation out of their own expertise and processes.
With this acquisition, NetDocuments brings in the 6000 organizations across 52 countries using Worldox.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
