Epiq has purchased legal operations consultancy Hyperion Global Partners in a move to expand its legal transformation business.

The deal includes Hyperion’s operations advisory practice as well as Hyperion Research, its analytics unit which provides legal solutions market intelligence on strategy, operations and technology.

It boosts the legaltech giant's advisory business, complementing its legal document processing, records management, ediscovery and information governance technology and services.

It is the latest of a series of deals and initiatives in the legal sector by legaltech companies, alternative legal service providers, the Big Four accountancy firms and law firms aimed at tapping into the drive by corporate legal departments to boost their efficiency.

Ziad Mantoura, SVP and general manager of Epiq’s legal transformation services business, said: “The recent pace of legal industry change has acutely accelerated the need for law departments and firms to be run like a business, including the need to embrace digital transformation. Hyperion has a team of expert consultants and a heritage of guiding clients to make intelligent, fact-based decisions to transform their businesses.”

Eyan Iffergan, Hyperion’s founder and CEO, joins Epiq as managing director of its new legal operations advisory business. The Houston-based consultancy, which was founded in 2009, lists seven employees on LinkedIn with cited clients including Novartis, Kraft Foods, Marsh and PepsiCo alongside the law firms Perkins Coie, Dentons and Sidley Austin.

Iffergan said: “Hyperion has long been recognised for our drive to deliver operational expertise and innovation, with a healthy dose of pragmatism, to help our clients execute legal operations transformation programmes. Our integration with Epiq… brings together a powerhouse of capabilities and scale – a dynamic professional toolkit to galvanise our clients’ keystone initiatives and empower legal teams everywhere to achieve operational performance excellence.”

The acquisition follows legaltech developer BigHand’s deal last week to buy UK-based resource management company Mason & Cook, which provides strategic consulting to law firms on how to allocate work more efficiently and better manage their resources through its resource planning software. 

Recent months have seen a push by Big Four accountants to grow their legal operations advisory businesses. In October, KPMG launched a global legal operations consultancy service, which it said brought together ‘more than 14 years of credentials and experience in the legal transformation space’ while in July Deloitte stepped up its US legal offering with the launch of a Legal Business Services practice offering managed legal and consultancy services.

A report published by Baretz+Brunelle in October found that more than a third of Am Law 100 firms have set up their own in-house ALSPs as they seek to win back revenue that has shifted to other legal services suppliers.