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By Likha C. Cuevas-Miel Reporter
THE knowledge process outsourcing
(KPO) arm of the Ayala group announced on Wednesday that it bought a
US-based litigation support and electronic data discovery company as
part of its efforts to integrate a whole suite of services for its
clients.
According to Alfredo I. Ayala,
Live It chief executive, Integreon Managed Solutions bought Datum
Legal Inc. for about $10 million, including working capital
infusion, from private investors in New York. Integreon is majority
owned by Live It, which is fully owned by Ayala Corp.
The conglomerate also owns 22
percent of business process outsourcing firms eTelecare Global
Solutions Inc. and 100 percent of Affinity Express.
Integreon said legal process
outsourcing would now account 30 percent of the company’s total
technology-driven portfolio. With the acquisition of Datum, the
company sees a 60-percent growth in revenues by yearend. Financial
integration would only come in by the second half of the year, Ayala
said. Last year, Integreon’s revenues jumped 144 percent with the
acquisition of CBF Group Inc., a US-based company providing 24-hour
administrative services to lawyers.
If the full-year revenue
contribution of Datum would be incorporated in Integreon’s total
for this year, then the parent firm’s revenue will grow 80
percent, Ayala said.
With the purchase of Datum, its
parent firm also launched a fixed price per document e-Discovery and
accelerated document review solution that will “enable
corporations to drastically and predictably reduce litigation costs
and improve the quality and speed of review,” the company said in
a statement.
After the buyout, Datum will now
be re-branded as Integreon and its 35 employees in Manhattan will
join the parent company. Ayala said the company will also beef up
its litigation review capability in the Philippines by increasing
its pool of lawyers from 20 to 100 by year-end to complement
operations in the US.
Now that it has a complete suite
of litigation support services, Integreon can work on the electronic
data discovery (EDD) that uses a search software to cut down the
number of documents for review by lawyers. When the relevant
documents are pared down, these are reviewed by Integreon’s
lawyers, bringing down the number of documents from 500,000 to
30,000. The streamlined sets of documents are then hosted in a
database that its clients can access anywhere in the world through
the Internet.
“We are a trusted provider of
law firms and general counsel. That’s a very difficult place to
get to because all of [this] information is extremely confidential,
important and no room for error. If you miss one document, you miss
the smoking gun so you can’t win your case. We [are] already in
the trusted space because we have been serving these guys for a long
time,” Ayala said.
EDD is “exploding in the US”
and aside from law firms, corporations also demand data mining from
back-office service providers, the company said. Because of this,
the Integreon chief executive is upbeat about growth prospects in
this area.
While it is growing its present
business lines like document management, research and analytics and
legal services, Integreon will still be on the look out for other
opportunities in the KPO space, Ayala said, adding “nothing is on
the front burner yet.”
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