P2P

75 I L T A N E T . O R G W e at "Olenick" are now "Olenick, a Qualitest Company" and soon will be completely "Qualitest". That one sentence changes everything for us, for our clients and for Qualitest (in a good way, let's start with that!). The journey has many questions and lessons for us all, in this merger-crazy industry? Law firms continue to merge and that trend is unlikely to change with all the economic pressures and the ongoing evolution of legal services. I'm intrigued by the variance between publicized reasons for mergers and the unspoken or whispered realities. Legal product and services companies are also merging as fewer stand-alone companies can compete with those who provide suites of applications and services. And sometimes the writing is on the wall and an acquisition is the best way out. There are as many opinions as there are law firms on whether the market consolidation of legal vendors is good for law firms. From the consumer perspective, does having a large number of companies providing document template software, as an example, make for better success for law firms? I think that depends on how well the software from the myriad companies integrates with other legal software and the increasingly complex legal desktop, how well they keep up with operating system upgrades, and how customizable they are to specific law firm needs. Is the flexibility of the small company balanced with the needed expertise? Only you can decide. Back to Olenick and the developing story of our acquisition: Tom Olenick spent 20 years building a small and mighty quality assurance company in Chicago, focusing on financial institutions and public utilities, who have major compliance and testing requirements. Bill Mertes joined Tom 12 years ago, recognizing that the legal industry was very immature in ensuring the success of its software projects. Bill built the Olenick legal practice, adding Scott Christensen and then me to the practice. Combined we have over 100 years of experience in legal IT leadership (yes, we've all three been around awhile). We've executed quality, testing and engineering engagements for 100+ law firms and a few legal departments. And we've helped mature the legal industry in QA, testing and automation. We've twice won ILTA's Consultant of the year award, because of the thought leadership and dedication to advancing legal technology and strategy across the industry. We have been the little company that could... and yet many of you have never really heard of us. Our thought leadership campaign hit a few bumps when COVID hit, cutting our education roadshow to two cities. We continued with education webinars, writing blogs and articles, and speaking at conferences. In the meantime, shortly before COVID hit, there were rumors that Olenick might be sold. Tom was looking for a company with a common vision to provide the most innovative and customer-centric software testing capabilities available in the world. He was looking for a similar culture of people first. Tom found Qualitest, or they found him, not sure if he used Tinder or Bumble. Through the pandemic, progression toward an acquisition continued slowly to the point of an announcement to staff in early March 2021. Qualitest and Olenick formed a joint integration team to help bring the businesses together when the transaction closed in mid-April. Tom remained as part of that transition team to work alongside Olenick employees and Qualitest leaders to ensure a seamless integration experience for employees and clients. We learned what we could about Qualitest to see where the acquisition might benefit our clients and the

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