Chicago-based kCura has offices in Poland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Asia, and naturally, Chicago. So acquiring a small 15-20 person Reston company a year ago might seem random, but for kCura, it was the perfect fit.
In March 2016, kCura acquired Reston's Content Analyst, which developed an analytics engine platform that would compliment the e-discovery software company's platform well. kCura's Relativity platform was being used by more than 12,000 organizations, including the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency, to sort through large volumes of data in places like litigation, internal investigations and compliance projects.
kCura made the deal a year ago, and the team hasn't looked back.
"It was a partnership that allowed us to provide more benefits to our customers," said Perry Marchant, kCura's vice president of engineering. "This was something that we acquired for two reasons: the technology and the team."
The tech at Content Analyst brought conceptual analytics to the table, allowing kCura to advance its e-discovery software to include services like email search. To understand the importance of that, kCura gave me this example: a Boston law firm needed to review 650,000 documents in a couple of months. The firm didn't have enough hours or manpower to make that happen. Relativity scanned each of the documents and prioritized the top 30,000 documents. It also was able to find several emails that discredited the claims of a witness. "Email is pretty much the bread and butter of any litigation, so any tool to let an end user sift through what is going on in that email thread is really valuable," Marchant said.
Getting the Reston team and the technology siloed into kCura's existing structure wasn't too difficult, Marchant said; it just took a lot of planning.
"After the acquisition, we put together what we wanted to do in a 30-, 60-, 90-day time period," Marchant said. "It could be anything from consolidating our tools to all the way through organizing different system sets that the two companies use."
In Reston, the office develops software that is both data analytics platform and machine-learning engine. Marchant can take us into the weeds of it, but it's basically the system that goes through the data and creates indexes that the main Chicago office can work with before the data gets back to the end user.
Finding that workflow wasn't all that difficult for the group though, seeing as Content Analyst and kCura had a working partnership prior to the acquisition. But now, kCura can best utilize the Reston team's software to develop things like email threading visualization, re-platforming a platform to work in the cloud, working on an active learning engine and other projects.
Being able to tap into an area like Reston and D.C. that obviously has some talent there is pretty exciting.
"The first 90-days was a lot of that: focused on our integration, getting into the rhythm of how we worked and getting those technical projects underway," Marchant said.
kCura is pretty retrospective, which makes sense considering it develops software designed to review past documents. Looking back at the acquisition, Marchant sees a smooth transition, ripe with opportunities.
"We had some generic problems about how we would license the platform going forward and things like that," Marchant said. "But I'm really happy about how excited the team is and the projects we have them working on. I think they're excited to focus on discovery problems because they were a more general platform. It's actually been pretty good."
The Reston team's size remained pretty much the same through the acquisition. Currently, it has 23 people. By the end of the year, it should be 50 people larger.
"It's a major city for us outside of Chicago," Marchant said. "Being able to tap into an area like Reston and D.C. that obviously has some talent there is pretty exciting."
Images courtesy of kCura
