Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) takes majority stake in Mitratech

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan agreed in March 2021 to make a strategic investment in Mitratech, through its private capital division. TA Associates, a minority shareholder since 2015, sold its entire holding, while Hg, which had controlled the business since 2017, kept a minority stake. Completion remained subject to customary conditions. Based in Austin, Texas, Mitratech develops software for the legal and compliance departments of large companies. Its products handle the work those departments carry out: tracking matters and litigation, managing contracts through drafting and renewal, recording the obligations a company must meet under each regulation that applies to it, and automating the workflows that run between them. Its e-billing software sits between corporate legal departments and the outside law firms they instruct, receiving and checking invoices against agreed rates before payment. More than 12,000 law firms use it to bill their corporate clients, and its own customers are the legal, risk and compliance functions of large enterprises, with over 500,000 users worldwide. Software of this kind is difficult to displace once installed: it holds the record of matters, contracts and obligations a company must be able to produce under audit, and replacing it means migrating years of documentation. That is what made the business attractive to successive owners and allowed it to grow through acquisitions, each adding a category of work the same departments already performed. Hg had spent four years building the company that way, and Ontario Teachers’ invested to continue it, funding both organic growth and further acquisitions to widen the range of software sold to the same enterprise clients. Lazard advised Mitratech and Hg, with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom as legal counsel, while Evercore advised Ontario Teachers’, with Sullivan & Cromwell as legal counsel.