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Niku expands portal services with legal buy

By spending $10 million on Legal Anywhere, which provides Web services to law firms and legal departments within corporations, Niku steps into the legal field.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
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Niku today said it has agreed to acquire Legal Anywhere in a deal valued at $10 million.

Legal Anywhere provides Web services to law firms and legal departments within corporations. Niku, which runs portals for the professional services industry that customers use to manage contracted employees and billing online, expects the acquisition to help expand its business within the legal field, according to the company.

With customers including American Airlines, Bell Atlantic and Kawasaki Motors, Tualatin, Ore.-based Legal Anywhere builds both intranets--Web sites companies use for their internal work needs--and extranets, used for collaborating with business partners.

Today's previously reported deal follows Niku's November acquisition of Proamics, a maker of accounting, time and expense, and billing software, in a stock deal valued at about $40 million.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Niku, which filed to go public last month, is led by Farzad Dibachi, a former Oracle senior vice president who left the database software maker in 1995 to start Diba, a designer of much-hyped Internet appliances that was later folded into Sun Microsystems. He launched Niku last May.

Niku sells its own software and operates the Niku Services Marketplace, a marketplace for buyers and sellers of professional services. People seeking work can post profiles of their skills, certifications and experience. Companies and organizations seeking resources can post project specifications and job requirements.

Niku competes in an emerging market against Opus 360, Evolve and others. International Data Corp. estimates that the market for packaged software such as Niku's, which automates the supply chain for service industries, will grow from approximately $600 million this year to $12 billion by 2003.