Granite & Comfrey (law firm internal know-how) Acquired by Tikit Group
9 September 2002

Tikit Group plc has acquired Granite & Comfrey Ltd, supplier of systems and services for managing the internal know-how of law firms and legal organisations.

Granite & Comfrey is a specialist company that focuses its capabilities on providing classification, thesaurus, and taxonomy services and tools to the legal profession. It is well known and highly regarded within the legal market and its acquisition is seen by Tikit as enhancing their ability to offer quality tools, consultancy and service in this area.

Granite & Comfrey was founded by Derek Sturdy in early 2000 to develop software for categorising, analysing and cross referencing legal cases, opinions and precedent documents primarily for the legal market. Development of the product suite has now been successfully completed and the software is already being used in a number of top 20 UK law firms.

Regular readers of Managing Information magazine will remember that Derek Sturdy is behind Loyita Worley's project OuRBase at Richards Butler you described in the April edition of MI on pages 32-33.

Granite & Comfrey have built a powerful and widely respected taxonomy system which clients can either use or modify to construct their own classification hierarchy enabling them to integrate with many third party applications as well Granite & Comfrey's own searching system. These systems are used in-house to support the document mark up and citation service that they offer to law firms. Typically Granite & Comfrey's main contacts in law firms have been with librarians, professional support lawyers and knowledge directors whilst Tikit's has been with IT directors.

The acquisition of Granite & Comfrey means that Tikit can now offer complementary options to clients who are building knowledge management and classification systems.

Although no-one is willing to admit it publicly, there has been much talk in legal information circles about the expensive knowledge management solutions purchased by law firms which have failed to deliver. Granite & Comfreys products and services are seen among information professionals as being a solution to this issue, being based on solid information management principles.

Further information: Derek Sturdy, Managing Director, Granite & Comfrey
Tel +44 (0) 1422 881390 / Email: derek.sturdy@infoengineers.com