BigHand acquired resource management leader Mason & Cook
As the first acquisition under its new ownership, BigHand announces bringing Mason & Cook into the group in a move that adds resource management to its growing list of capabilities. This further cements BigHand’s position as a leading provider of legal workflow and productivity tools.
Since it was founded in 2013, in response to growing market demand, Mason & Cook has provided strategic consulting to law firms on work allocation and lawyer resource management. On the back of those engagements, they developed a unique resource planning software solution built by legal experts specifically for law firms. The resulting solution is being used by some of the most respected global law firms and addresses all key areas of legal work allocation and resource management for all internal stakeholders within law firms.
While the solution is designed to be sold separately and will continue to be offered as a separate solution, there are identified integrations with existing BigHand solutions that create development synergies. BigHand has seen continued growth across both its legal matter pricing & profitability solutions and its legal task delegation workflow solution. By integrating resource management capabilities into both, customers will derive even greater value from those tools while accessing unique insight into utilisation and capacity.
Dave Cook, Mason & Cook CEO, commented:“Resource management has become increasingly fundamental to how law firms operate in recent years. As a result of the shift to remote working, and a critical need to understand capability and capacity on a constant basis, there has been a surge in demand for our services, technology and expertise. We looked to the market to enable us to scale and create the infrastructure needed, on a global basis, to meet this increasing demand. We have always admired and respected BigHand, in addition to seeing extremely close synergies with their existing products and services. This was a perfect opportunity to join the group, for the benefit of our existing and future clients, and for our people to continue to evolve resource management best practice across the global legal sector.
Nearly all our customers are already BigHand customers and we can use their experience to scale our development capacity; we are now able to add two full development teams immediately. In addition, it is great to know our tech will complement and enhance their existing solutions. It has been exciting to already work on the joint roadmap.”
Dave Cook, founder of Mason & Cook, along with his team will join BigHand as full-time employees and continue to offer resource management consulting while working with the development team on enhancing the product further.
James Kippenberger, Chief Product Officer at BigHand commented:“This is a really exciting partnership for both parties. For customers building a budget in a pricing tool and adding fee earners to that budget, resource managers currently have to do it ‘blind’; they don’t know who is free, they don’t know who is the most suitable resource, nor do they know who has the optimum skills or experience. Having access to that information will significantly improve the robustness of any resulting budget. Equally, our current workflow solution focuses on task delegation from lawyers to support teams but we are frequently asked by customers who implement it about lawyer-to-lawyer delegation which is a roadmap item currently in detailed research phase. Our vision is that by having a legal resource management platform integrated with an extended workflow tool, customers will have a truly unique end-to-end solution. In addition, as we continue to broaden our legal business intelligence solution well beyond offering historical financial insight, being able to layer in future-looking capacity management data will be a very welcome addition for clients.”
Sam Toulson, CEO at BigHand states:“We’ve been aware of the great work Dave and his team have been doing for some time and have been impressed with how they’ve developed their market leading position in such a short number of years. As we looked at our own product roadmap and ways to support our clients further, a combination with Mason & Cook had compelling strategic logic. Our vision is to be regarded as the first choice globally in every solution we offer, while acting as the most respected software partner to law firms around the world. Mason & Cook bring incredible legal expertise to our business as well as the market leading product in the space. It’s exciting to complete this acquisition so quickly under our new ownership with LLCP and I’m delighted to welcome Dave and the Mason & Cook team to BigHand”.
