Epiq Acquires Fireman & Co. to Gain Data, Knowledge Management Expertise

Legal service provider Epiq announced Tuesday it has acquired Fireman & Co. to meet law firms’ and corporate legal departments’ growing appetite for robust data and knowledge management. Financial details of the transaction were not provided.

After growing to over 20 employees during its 10 years of operation, Fireman & Co. president and founder Joshua Fireman said his company needed additional resources and scalability to keep pace with evolving demands.

He noted that the company has “grown to a size where the next step forward for us to really serve the market that is asking so much from our team, from undertaking two to three programs to change how they work from data and processes,” would be an acquisition. He added, “Epiq allows us to scale our business while preserving our quality and culture.”

To be sure, while Epiq provides e-discovery, compliance, staffing and other legal services across the globe, it lacked knowledge management and data management consulting experience. Such consulting inexperience would leave Epiq ill-prepared for a burgeoning knowledge management boom in the legal industry, said Ziad Mantoura, Epiq senior vice president and general manager of its legal transformation services business.

“If you look at the big multinational law firms, what they do with their knowledge is increasingly becoming important especially in a world where everyone has gone remote or hybrid,” Mantoura said. “This is becoming increasingly important not just on the law firm side but the corporate legal department side [too].”

Indeed, in recent years law firms have announced initiatives to broadly leverage their lawyers’ expertise and experience for client decisions. In October 2020, for instance, Baker McKenzie announced a partnership with software developer SparkBeyond to leverage the global firm’s and third-party data to help predict client needs.

Mantoura said enhanced knowledge and data management will create a competitive edge for law firms and corporate legal departments.

“That ability to harness all that data [and] augment that with external resources of data will be powerful. It’s an area [where if] law firms and in-house legal attorneys get that right, it’s a real source of competitive advantage.”

While Mantoura said the Fireman & Co. brand will remain, he noted Epiq clients will gain access to the newly acquired company’s experts, including Fireman, who is set to join Epiq as managing director of Fireman & Co.

Fireman said he expects all of his employees to join Epiq and help create new models to help clients meet their diversity obligations, conduct enterprise searches, create digital workspaces and other tasks.

“We work as partners [with clients] to solve problems and to advance the art and business of law and what this [acquisition] gives us is the ability to hit that on a scale that wasn’t available to us previously,” Fireman said.

When asked if Epiq would acquire additional companies, Mantoura declined to provide details. However, he pointed to Epiq’s history of acquisitions and said the company would continue to grow organically.

Epiq, which merged with Document Technologies Inc. (DTI) in 2016, hasn’t been shy about acquiring companies in recent years. In 2018, it acquired Crawford & Co.’s legal services subsidiary Garden City Group. In 2019 Epiq acquired high-volume legal dispute resolution services provider Garretson Resolution Group, it purchased legal operations consultancy Hyperion in 2020 and flexible legal staffing firm Simplex Services Inc. in 2021. Epiq also unveiled its in-house attorney staffing service Epiq Counsel in late 2020.