At its Inspire 2021 customer conference today, the cloud content management platform NetDocuments is announcing that it has acquired Afterpattern, a no-code automation toolkit for legal professionals to produce document and workflow automations.

The company said that Afterpattern will be natively integrated into the NetDocuments platform, in order to allow customers to further focus on the “create” aspect of the document lifecycle. NetDocuments will provide more details on the integration early in 2022, it said.

“As we continue our journey to help legal professionals do their best work, we are always looking for new technology that will accelerate this path forward,” Josh Baxter, NetDocuments CEO, said in announcing the acquisition. “Adding Afterpattern to the NetDocuments platform is a prime example.

“One of the things we hear consistently is that lawyers and their teams need to build more automation into their legal workflows — from making requests, to capturing data, to generating complex sets of documents. When I saw the sophistication and capabilities of the Afterpattern legal practice automations, I knew this is what many of our customers are looking for today.”

Thomas Officer, Afterpattern’s cofounder and design lead, said that NetDocuments is the perfect environment for Afterpattern’s automation builder. “Almost every legal workflow includes a document or email, so what better place to build those automations than the leading secure, cloud-based document management system.”

Dan Hauck, chief product officer at NetDocuments, described Afterpattern as a tool that lets legal teams easily create complex automations that result in the generation of legal documents needed to power their organizations.

“Whether you are a boutique real estate or intellectual property firm, inhouse generalist or BigLaw innovation officer – or practically anything in between – Afterpattern’s technology can produce exactly what you need – with the same speed, precision, and reliability that you expect from NetDocuments,” Hauck said.

Both Officer and cofounder and president Scott Kelly will join NetDocuments as part of the acquisition.

“We think Afterpattern plus NetDocuments represents an extraordinary opportunity to put workflows right there where our users can use them and deliver value to their customers,” Kelly said.

In this video from today’s conference, Hauck interviews Kelly and Officer about the acquisition.

NetDocuments acquires Afterpattern interviews – short from Hadlock Productions on Vimeo.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.