Update: Tabs3 CEO Dan Berlin Will Remain With Company After Acquisition, He Says.
Earlier this week, I reported on the unannounced acquisitions by MyCase of two legal technology companies, CASEpeer and Woodpecker. Now there is another stealth deal to report, this time involving the acquisition of Tabs3 Software, which is one of the oldest practice management products in the legal market, having been founded in 1979, and which also owns the cloud-based practice management platform CosmoLex, which it acquired in 2018.
In March, Thompson Street Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owned Tabs3 (the company’s formal name is Software Technology LLC), announced that it had sold the Lincoln, Neb., company “to a new capital partner.” However, the announcement did not identify the new owner, leaving its identity a mystery.
I have now learned that the unidentified new owner is ProfitSolv, the company formed last year by the private equity firm Lightyear Capital LLC.
I have not been able to reach the CEOs of ProfitSolv or Tabs3 to confirm this information.
Last year, ProfitSolv made two notable acquisitions of legal technology companies: Rocket Matter, the pioneering cloud-based practice management company, and TimeSolv, a provider of cloud-based legal billing and timekeeping software.
Assuming my information is correct, then this latest acquisition combines under one roof the practice management products CosmoLex, Rocket Matter and Tabs3, the time-and-billing product TimeSolv, the payments processing company LexCharge, and and ImagineTime, a practice management and payments company serving accounting and other professional services firms.
Tabs3 is a desktop product includes billing, financials and practice management. It acquired CosmoLex in 2018, saying at the time that it had a combined customer base of over 100,000 legal professionals in the U.S. and Canada.
Dan Berlin, who has been president and CEO of Tabs3 since 1984, is a well-known fixture on the legal tech scene. I do not know whether he plans to stay with the company.
ProfitSolv’s CEO is Kelley Castell, who came to ProfitSolv after having served in several senior leadership roles at fintech and payments companies.