Amid Busy Year for Elite, CEO Mark Dorman Discusses Being on Both Ends of Acquisitions
Now owned by Francisco Partners, Elite is trying to move customers to the cloud after completing integration of software and talent from its purchase of Tranch.
What You Need to Know
Elite, which was recently acquired by Francisco Partners, has been integrating Tranch, which it bought in January
The company has seen an accelerating shift to cloud-based software delivery, driven by performance improvements
It’s been a busy year for law firm financial management and business operations solutions provider Elite. The company began 2025 with the purchase of B2B invoice automation and payments platform Tranch, rolled out artificial intelligence-powered outside counsel guideline review tool Validate in February, and was acquired by private equity firm Francisco Partners in a deal that closed earlier this month.
Legaltech News sat down with CEO Mark Dorman to discuss ownership changes, acquisitions and legal tech’s transition to cloud-based software.
What changed for Elite following the acquisition by Francisco Partners? Does the purchase provide greater access to capital for internal expansion or further acquisitions?
It's more of the same, to be honest, but with an owner that is focused exclusively on technology, has seen the end of the movie before, and a lot of different industry verticals, and can help us. Obviously they've got access to a lot of capital if we need to do a bunch of acquisitions, but we're already a pretty well-capitalized business, so we can plow our own furrows, so to speak. It really is very much a partnership on, “how do we accelerate the strategy that we were already on?”
Elite made an acquisition of its own with the purchase of Tranch earlier this year. How has the process of integrating them gone?
It's been terrific, really, it's been a really good add to the value that we can deliver. We think of [everything] from intake to cash in the back office of a law firm, and how we can help them be more effective in automating their financial management and their business operations. The core, big part of that is revenue intelligence. How do they really understand when a bill turns into an invoice, which invoices related to which matters, how they get visibility, how they can enable the payment between their clients and the firm, and how they apply that within their system, and ultimately collect the cash? Tranch, embedded inside now natively in our 3E cloud product, really helps bring all of that together in a way that adds a lot of value to our customers.
So on the product side, and how we manifest that for our customers, it's been really great to be able to get that capability and add that value. A lot of our new cloud customers are taking that and really moving to Elite payments, which is embedded in that side, and using those capabilities. And then, from a talent perspective, we've got good integration with the Tranch team, that are now the Elite team … bringing a different perspective, with a new set of skills and capabilities, really building out Elite’s talent in the organization.
Are acquisitions a way you’d want to continue growing in the future?
Our strategy is not dependent on M&A, but if there's a great company out there that's doing something really interesting and unique that really adds value to our customers, and we see that there's a good match, then yeah, we'll certainly look at M&A as a path to get there. … If we can get a company's assets and capabilities like Tranch into our ecosystem and our platform faster through M&A than through organically building it, then we'll certainly do that.
It’s been about 15 months since the launch of 3E Essentials. What’s the growth of that product looked like? Do you ever worry it may eat into the market for the legacy 3E offering?
It's been good. It's for a specific segment of the market. I think the thing to remember about 3E Essentials [is], it's a preconfigured version of our overall platform designed for a very specific segment of the market, and within that segment of the market, it does really well. What it's also done, is that it's allowed people to think through, “well, do I want the preconfigured version, or do I want the full version?” We have a lot of conversations, not just about 3E Essentials, but also around our full 3E cloud capabilities as people get more comfortable about, “I actually want to have the flexibility to do the orchestration, I need to think about the other types of technology, and as my firm grows and develops, I don't want to block myself out of other component parts.” So within the segment that it is operating in, it's doing incredibly well, but more broadly it opens up a larger conversation.
You guys have made a big push to move from on-premises software to cloud-based. What are the advantages of switching?
For the customers, they're moving to a much more modern construct of delivering solutions for them. … As we're embedding AI, which we are across the platform generally, and then specifically within key products like our Elite Validate product that we launched in February this year, that can only be done in the cloud. So there's a component of being on a modern architecture that gives you access to the newest, best technology that enables your business to be more successful, [that] is really only available in the cloud.
The other component is, they're moving from a world which is rather static—once you move to aversion of the software, that's you until you do an upgrade of that software at some point in time. Whereas, as you move to a SaaS-native platform, … you're not having to think about those upgrades that distract, you're not looking after infrastructure. As a law firm, your business is not to be a software business or a data center. That's not the job of a law firm. You can hand that over to us, and it will get incrementally better over time. It's a combination of making sure their operations are run more effectively, [making sure] the talent within the law firm, which are obviously professional services firms, … are focused on the highest and best use of their talents, and we can look after the infrastructure.
We’ve seen comments about a capability gap opening up between on-prem and cloud-based software. Where does that come from?
There's two components to it. One is just, the pace of innovation is faster on SaaS. We're doing a release every quarter, so there's new capabilities being embedded quarter after quarter, versus on-prem, we have a two-year upgrade cycle. So you can think, over those two years, there's been eight cycles of new capabilities built into the platform.
The other component, the technology that we're able to apply in the cloud, is just significantly more advanced. If we think about the most advanced [software], that's where all of this—it’s not an Elite thing—this is where all of software is going. Those things exist primarily in the cloud.
The other component that probably gets a little lost when we think about AI and data, which are the two big topics that everyone talks about, is the workflow between the processes is much more sophisticated and much more easily able to be configured and orchestrated in the cloud than it is on-prem. That's much more dynamic, that you can begin to change the workflow, understand the data and where the challenges are, and how do you make little tweaks here and there. That's much more flexible in the cloud than it is on-prem. … Getting to the cloud is just stage one. The real value is the journey whilst they're there, that they can continually iterate and make their businesses more effective, because they're focused on real business problems, not just managing the infrastructure that is incredibly valuable to that specific firm.
As cloud adoption accelerates overall, what holds back customers who have yet to make the transition—concerns about security, status quo bias?
Where we stand today in 2025 is fundamentally different than where we were when I joined Elite in 2023, which was, there was a lot of, “I'm not sure, we have to think about it.”
Where we stand today, in 2025, the question now is, “when can I get to the cloud?” There's an acceptance— “I will get there, it's just, what are the unique circumstances in my individual journey?” For a firm, because there are other priorities, business priorities have got to get lined up. Many of those legacy issues that you mentioned, they're pretty much in the rearview mirror. And every conversation we have is, “when can we get there? We see the advantage of being in the cloud … versus building some machine in the back.”
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