In-House Counsel Want Legal Spend Analytics... New Merger Aims To Give It To Them Even Easier

Onit acquires Bodhala.

If there’s any buzzword in the legal tech space these days, it’s analytics. Data is coming in from everywhere and there’s finally robust enough tools to sort it all, so everyone’s looking to Moneyball out the legal space. And just like the trend that took over baseball, sometimes it can go too far and leave you with a lot of information about “batting left-handed against right-handed pitchers on Wednesdays during the waxing phase of a lunar cycle,” but those instances are few and far between: good analytics are more often than not going to provide actionable insights.

Onit announced this morning that they’ve acquired Bodhala, adding the AI-powered legal spend analytics company to its existing enterprise workflow business. Bodhala focused on helping in-house counsel source outside counsel at competitive and market-driven rates through machine learning tech, within its new ecosphere, it aims to complement Onit and SimpleLegal offerings for corporate legal customers.

Considering Onit’s existing products, Bodhala seems to fit right in. “A decade ago, Onit reinvented enterprise legal management by showing how workflow and process automation could drive useful and easily adopted best practices. Today, we occupy the forefront of business process automation, AI and legal business intelligence. Our vision for the next wave of business transformation has legal departments running their operations based on actionable data,” said Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit. “The acquisition of Bodhala, combined with our enterprise legal management and AI-enabled technology platforms, gives our customers the power to exponentially multiply the savings and value associated with their legal spend.”

Meanwhile, I talked to Bodhala CEO Raj Goyle back in 2018 and learned a bit about what his product brings to the table:

As Bodhala co-CEO Raj Goyle describes it, Bodhala’s mission is to “solve several kinds of pain for clients.” And when it comes to client pain, outside spend is a notorious one. What Bodhala brings, in Goyle’s opinion, is a big data play and a robust algorithm to allow clients to get deep on solving procurement pain. As he puts it, most legal departments are “still in the age of the slide rule while managing a $400B industry.”

Taking Bodhala’s proven product and adding it to Onit’s structure should help expand its reach to even more clients. It’s all about “ubiquity” to borrow a term from another big legal tech merger. Taking solutions focused on key aspects of the workflow and bringing them under the roof of companies aiming to create end-to-end workflow solutions is becoming a bit of a trend. That said, Bodhala will function as an independent subsidiary, like the arrangement Onit did with SimpleLegal, allowing Bodhala to remain “e-biller agnostic,” as Goyle told Bob Ambrogi.

Of note, this is Onit’s third acquisition this year and fourth since 2019. So much for the idea that legal tech consolidation is going to slow down, which is shaping up to be my worst prediction of the year.

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Well, after “everyone will get vaccinated and we’ll be fine by the end of July.” If only I’d had some reliable analytics for that one.

Earlier: There’s No Such Thing As A Competitive Legal Market — But There Are Ways To Make It Better

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