ALSP Elevate Buys Sagacious IP In Latest Deal

In yet another legal tech, or adjacent, M&A deal, Elevate has announced the acquisition of intellectual property research company Sagacious IP, with its co-founders Anant Kataria and Tarun Bansal joining the Elevate management team.

This is their third acquisition in nine months, with the CJK Group coming in May and Redgrave Data in September 2024. It also follows a spate of legal tech M&A deals across the market so far in 2025.

Founded in 2008, Sagacious serves law department and law firm customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies in the US, Europe, China, Japan and beyond, they said.

Joining the founders is a team of ‘over 500 professionals including IP experts from diverse technology areas including ICT, Engineering, Automotive, Life Sciences, and Chemistry’.

These IP professionals are trained in US, European, and other IP laws and have multilingual expertise, including Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Liam Brown, Elevate’s Chairman and CEO, who is based in LA, said: ‘Just as with our two previous acquisitions in the previous nine months, our combination with Sagacious reflects our strategy to offer expertise and technology to innovate and transform work with a legal and business dimension that needs to be done every day, often at scale.’

IP is exactly the sort of critical “run-the-business” legal activity other Elevate offerings address. With IP management being increasingly important to businesses, the Sagacious expertise, capabilities, and technology will be of immediate interest to many of our existing and potential customers.’

Anant Kataria, Sagacious co-founder, concluded: ‘The IP needs of organisations do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are one component of overall legal and business activities.’ And Tarun Kumar Bansal, Sagacious co-founder, added: ‘As part of Elevate, we are now able to serve existing customers and gain new ones with a robust set of complimentary offerings that reflect the broader context in which IP exists.’

Another interesting move by Elevate, the law company and ALSP, as it continues to widen its capabilities and add new revenue streams to the business.

The move comes at an important time for ALSPs, given the rise of genAI, which could both support more ALSP growth, or disrupt their business model depending on their approach.

In this case, it looks like Elevate is going for higher value services in the shape of IP.