Technology

Ipro Tech Acquires NetGovern To Expand Offerings

The result is a powerful and complementary end-to-end information governance, e-discovery, and trial solution.

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Ipro Tech has been around in the legal technology space for as long as I can remember. I was using their eCapture tool in the ’90s before the EDRM and most of the processing engines in the market even existed. Today, they are a leader in the legal technology industry, providing solutions across the e-discovery lifecycle.

Recently, the Tempe, Arizona-based company announced the acquisition of NetGovern, an information and data governance and compliance product. I saw this as reason to sit down with Ipro Tech CEO Dean Brown to talk about the acquisition of NetGovern and the future roadmap for the company.

For better or worse, Ipro has a perceived reputation as a software company for the small to medium-sized organization. Brown told me, however, that that is not entirely accurate. “Sure, we’ve got about 2,000 customers using the Ipro Desktop product, and some of them are small firms. But the fact is that Ipro Enterprise, which combines processing, review, and production in an on-premise or SaaS-based model, is the e-discovery product of choice for about 300 corporate, law firm, service provider, and government customers.”

“People do not realize how much Ipro can scale,” Brown said. “We have a presence within 85% of the Am Law 100, and we’ve got customers with 40 million records in Ipro. And now, with the addition of NetGovern, Ipro is only going to continue to innovate and influence the legal technology space.”

Brown expressed genuine excitement about the NetGovern acquisition. “Never before have I been this excited to be in the legal technology space,” he said. “This gives us an end-to-end solution, from information governance through trial. Not many companies can alone offer solutions that touch upon each phase of the e-discovery lifecycle.”

Ipro’s mission stems from customer frustration with the explosion of data volumes and the need to have a more recursive workflow for managing their data and e-discovery processes. The linear EDRM framework is fine, but how can customers get better insight into data earlier? How can they combine analytics on data in place and then use real-time bidirectional connectors to not only access the data, but also to satisfy data management, compliance, and e-discovery needs across the enterprise?

The NetGovern acquisition, combined with analytics tools Ipro has been developing, and solid e-discovery processing, review, and production tools, will enable customers to federate many processes across any data source, reducing time and cost to production.

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The combination will also be a relatively light lift because both Ipro and NetGovern use a similar framework and an API and (micro)services-based architecture to integrate other tools. If a customer wants to insert additional analytics tools between NetGovern and the Ipro suite of tools to dig deeper into the data, that is completely possible. Performing enterprise-wide EDA searches across a company’s data sources will now be a breeze for Ipro customers.

Looking ahead, Brown has hired an entire UX team to reimagine the user experience in Ipro. He told me that they will be integrating all of their service offerings, including search and legal hold, into the e-discovery platform to give users better insight into their data. The focus is going to be on usability and workflows.

And of course, the powerful search and analytics of the NetGovern product will be front and center since that is where an organization’s data lives to begin with. A powerful early data-assessment solution will not only help organizations better manage the data that they have, but will also enable them to better identify PII and PHI early in the process, which makes downstream e-discovery activities more efficient.

Ipro will not be going down the forensic collection path. Ipro will focus on customer data management. After identifying the necessary data, users will have the control to preserve broadly, but then strategically promote for review. Users will be able to move data right into processing, or they can park the data in an archival copy.

I asked Brown whether the acquisition of NetGovern means there will be a rebranding at some point. “No” he replied. “We will continue to market and sell to segments of the industry using the NetGovern or Ipro brands, as appropriate.”

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Like with every company in the industry, 2020 has been a challenging year, Brown reported. But Ipro has been growing for years and has retained 90% of its customers. In fact, the NetGovern acquisition is a net gain because in addition to their headquarters, Ipro will now have offices in Montreal and in Germany, two outposts of NetGovern. And all of NetGovern’s management has been folded into the Ipro team.

“We believe in helping customers,” Brown told me. “The ability to federate processes across any data source and build workflows that help customers solve business problems is what we offer.” With NetGovern on the left side, their traditional processing, review, and production tools in the center, and Trial Director — still one of the most popular trial presentation tools on the right side — Ipro, a tried and true 30-year veteran of the legal technology space, has built an end-to-end solution that will empower customers across the e-discovery lifecycle.

Mike Quartararo

Mike Quartararo is the President of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS), a professional member association providing training and certification in e-discovery. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery and a consultant providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@aceds.org. Follow him on Twitter @mikequartararo.

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