By Bill Bice, CEO of nQ Zebraworks; former founder and CEO of ProLaw Software and then at TR, West km.

• West’s acquisition of ProLaw and then Elite in the early 2000s was designed to embed West’s proprietary information and legal research into practice management workflows.
• It was a compelling vision that wasn’t realized because of the standard challenges of large company bureaucracy and the Innovator’s Dilemma.
• Compelling products like West km showed the potential that was never fully realized.
• Without realizing true synergies, the software unit never became strategic to the company.

The driving reason behind West’s acquisition of ProLaw in 2001 was a compelling vision of leveraging Westlaw in practice management to turbocharge legal workflows. Instead of legal research and practice management being separate tasks and processes, they could be brought together, making the practice of law better.

The first attempt was West’s own system, WestWorks. This was in the late 90s, with a precursor to software-as-a-service (SaaS) known as application service provider or ASP. It was amazingly forward looking, but even West’s market presence couldn’t overcome the technology and bandwidth challenges at that early stage of online software.

To West’s credit, they choose to pivot, and started looking for an established practice management system to acquire. We heard they were looking at one of our competitors and weren’t excited about someone else having the weight of West behind them,...

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