Reed Smith’s Tech Subsidiary GravityStack Hits Maturity Milestone

Since launching as an independent legal tech subsidiary of Reed Smith in last April, GravityStack has been quickly ramping up its business. The subsidiary has developed five proprietary legal tech platforms that it licenses as cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) products to hundreds of clients, including corporate legal departments and other law firms, according to Bryon Bratcher, managing director of GravityStack.

Recently, GravityStack also took a big step forward in becoming more of a full-service legal technology provider. Early this month, it licensed its e-discovery analytics and business intelligence tool Periscope, initially created by Reed Smith in 2014, as an on-premise solution for Toronto-based law firm McCarthy Tétrault.

It was the first time GravityStack sold an on-premise license for one of its products, and Bratcher believes one of the first times a law firm-created company offered a proprietary legal tech solution to another firm in an on-premises installation.

Bratcher called the development a “turning point” for GravityStack. “I definitely would say this is a sign of maturity for us based on growth and capabilities and specification of what we can do,” he said.

Unlike cloud products, an on-premise license requires setting up software within a client’s own IT environment so that it can run locally without having to connect to outside servers. Offering on-premise installation of Periscope, which Bratcher previously described to Legaltech News as a “data warehouse” that sits on top of different e-discovery platforms to track “the speed and accuracy of document reviewers at the individual level,” is no easy feat.

“Because Periscope is a data warehouse it inherently is going to connect to different data sources, and each customer has different data sources, different technology environments, and different technology they need to have Periscope connected to,” Bratcher said. Still, he noted that while on-premise solution deployments can be challenging, they can also be “exciting because we learn more with each installation.”

Periscope is being used in McCarthy Tétrault’s “MT>3” division, an e-discovery and information governance services group created from the firm’s 2017 purchase of Canadian law firm Wortzmans.

Susan Wortzman, a partner in the Toronto office of McCarthy Tétrault, said Periscope helps the firm “trace the life cycle of our information through our Nuix and Relativity e-discovery platforms, and it also has all the functionality to help us with cost and budget.”

Asked why the firm wanted on-premise installation of Periscope, Chuck Rothman, director of Data Engineering and Analytics at MT>3, noted there were several reasons. “One is because we are in Canada, we couldn’t use Periscope in a hosted environment in the U.S. just because of Canadian privacy requirements,” he said. “We also have internal security requirements that were a lot easier to satisfy by setting up an internal on-premise solution, and finally because of the way we implement Nuix and Relativity as on-premise solutions.”

Rothman added that one of the biggest challenges in bringing Periscope in-house “was designing interfaces so that Periscope could communicate with Relativity and Nuix. Our configuration of Relativity and Nuix is different in that we have completely separate networks and servers for each.”

To be sure, Reed Smith has installed Periscope on premise in its own environment, and Bratcher likes to think of Reed Smith as GravityStack’s first client, though he notes “that kind of doesn’t count.”

Periscope is also just one several platforms GravityStack has developed and licenses to its clients. Others include Pipeline, a legal project management platform; Stack-et, a legal operations ticketing and collaboration software; Diligence, an artificial intelligence contract management solution; and Anonymizer, a data privacy tool for the Relativity e-discovery platform.

Bryon noted that so far, these platforms have only been licensed as cloud-based SaaS products, though he expects to license them as on-premise solutions in the coming months.

"We have about two dozen firms and solution providers that are looking at these tools right now and evaluating them for their own needs. I suspect we would have our first on-premise licenses for them in the first quarter of 2019,” he explained.

Similarly, he also expects the number of clients, including law firms, that license Periscope as an on-premises tool “to rise in 2019.”