Extract from Zach Warren’s article “Inside Consilio’s Legility Acquisition and What It Means for the Company’s Future”
On Tuesday, e-discovery and legal services provider Consilio announced it had acquired fellow legal services provider Legility for an undisclosed sum. The deal capped an active year for Consilio, which saw a new investor in Stone Point Capital join in April, followed by high-profile M&A activity with Xact Data Discovery (XDD) and Special Counsel’s EQ and D4 units in the months following.
Soon after the deal, Consilio CEO Andy Macdonald sat down with Legaltech News for a chat about the acquisition, Consilio’s wild 2021, and where the company intends to grow from here. And to hear Macdonald tell it, he wasn’t expecting the past nine months to be as action-packed as they turned out to be: “This wouldn’t have been my scheme to do these three deals as quickly as we did, but at the timing was right.”
Indeed, Macdonald said the idea behind the Legility acquisition had been percolating for a while, as he had been chatting with Legility CEO Barry Dark off and on for years. “We both had a pretty consistent view on the market, that it was consolidating, that it was going to continue to consolidate. In that, there was a good strategic fit between the two companies,” Macdonald said.
Talks began in earnest, however, after XDD came on board, and he was able to sit down with Dark and XDD’s Bob Polus together about what the integration of all the companies would look like. A month later, Consilio received a call from Gridiron Capital, Legility’s investment firm, that they were taking the company to market.
