My Legalweek Exterro briefing with CMO Bill Piwonka focused on their recent acquisition, GenAI powered legal holds and overall data risk management brand. Since taking $100M in funding from Leeds Equity Partners in 2018, Exterro has grown by acquisition and integration of privacy and data governance, forensics, legal hold and data discovery technologies.
Legalweek announcements:
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- Exterro already OEM’d Divebell technology to power their active data discovery functionality. I view this as a ‘captive acquisition’ where it was easier to buy than rent the technology. That does not diminish the potential value to legal of tools that make enterprise sources transparent and accessible.
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- The release of Exterro Assist, an AI assistant as an add-on for Exterro Legal Hold customers marks their entry in the modern AI battles. Natural language driven hold scopes and actions make great demo fodder for non-technical legal buyers. They also have the potential to ease onboarding and generate task efficiency savings. Exterro is leveraging their prior AI investments in their ‘Smart ECA’ module that generated AI insights to expand and define custodial-topic scope. It makes sense that Exterro is adding AI assistance to their hold and data discovery modules first. This work on the platform backbone should ease expansion to FTK and other Data Risk Management modules. We did not talk price (no one wanted to talk AI pricing…) and it does make me wonder whether legacy Zapproved and AccessData customers will embrace the additional complexity and cost. I would be interested to talk to a broader range of customers at Exterro XChange to find out.
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- Pretty straightforward integration to make Smarsh customer archive data accessible to the Exterro GRC platform.
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- A good case study by Hanover’s Linda Luperchio, long time corporate legal expert, on how her team leverages the Exterro Data Mapping, Data Management and other tools to streamline and visualize the eDiscovery process.
Exterro was one of three eDiscovery companies that peers highlighted as ‘actually making AI useful instead of just marketing hype’. The discussion with Bill confirmed the solid value proposition. I would have loved time with Ajith or his team to better relay the underlying AI models, integration points and ‘down in the trenches’ tech points that really do make a difference. I will take the blame for changing their time slot when my Microsoft Booking calendar went rogue and started triple booking my limit briefing slots this year.
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