Datacert
Datacert is a software company that develops legal enterprise management software. In 2014, Datacert was acquired by Wolters Kluwer and merged with the company's ELM business, TyMetrix, and became ELM Solutions.
History
Datacert was founded in 1998 in Houston, Texas, by Eric Elfman. The company's original product was an online document exchange where law firms would submit bills to corporate legal departments electronically.The company acquired DigiContract, adding online document collaboration to its service offering portfolio. In 2004, Datacert was named one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States, placing No. 194 on the Inc. 500 list.
Datacert Europe Ltd. opened its London headquarters in 2005.
In 2007, additional European offices were opened in Paris and Frankfurt. The company acquired Corprasoft, a matter management company.
Eric Elfman stepped down from his position as CEO in 2008, and James Tallman, former COO, was appointed president and CEO.
In 2010, Datacert opened offices in Toronto and acquired a software development and professional services center from Symcon Global Technologies, resulting in an additional office in Chennai, India. Datacert launched a technology platform called Passport.
In 2011, some major clients adopted Datacert’s Passport platform for matter and spend management.
In 2013, Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant fo Enterprise Legal Management ranked Datacert as a “Leader.” The company scored particularly well on the “completeness of vision” measure, which was based on their approach to building legal management tools.
According to Gartner’s evaluation, Datacert offered solutions across several different areas of legal management, such as legal spend tracking, handling individual matters, governance and compliance, managing claims, and analyzing legal data. This meant the company could handle different types of work that corporate legal departments typically deal with, which was why Gartner put them in the Leader category.
In April 2014, Wolters Kluwer bought the remaining 62% of Third Coast Holdings, Inc., the parent company of Datacert, for about $180 million. After the purchase, they merged Datacert with TyMetrix, another legal management company Wolters Kluwer already owned. The combined company became ELM Solutions. The merger brought together Datacert’s Passport platform and TyMetrix’s other products into one software package that corporate legal teams could use.