ADERANT, a global provider of business and financial management software for law firms, today announced that the Company has purchased a suite of Enterprise Content Management applications developed by StarLaw.  The acquisition adds integrated document management, records management, and email management solutions to ADERANT’s product portfolio.

ADERANT’s purchase of StarLaw’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) applications enables it to enter a market that is of growing importance to lawyers and law firms.  Importantly, the new ECM application suite is being designed with the unique needs of law firms in mind instead of trying to retrofit a more industry-generic solution with functionality required by the legal market.

The full press release from ADERANT can be read here.   They say the new ECM applications will be generally available in Q1 2010.   We don’t know exactly how this could affect the ECM landscape for the legal vertical, but Kraft Kennedy has seen and worked with StarLaw’s platform for a couple of years now.  It is one of the next generation ECM products, built to manage documents, email, and records in one interface.   And unlike Autonomy iManage and Open Text eDOCS, the ADERANT StarLaw applications are not based on a schema that was originally designed for filling out large profile cards and filing into a flat database.

As soon as we know more about this development in the ECM space, we’ll be sure to post about it!