Zebraworks and ProLaw Founder Bill Bice Joins nQueue as Co-CEO
Tempe, AZ – August 11, 2020 – nQueue, the leading provider of printing, scanning and cost recovery solutions for the legal industry, today announced that it has completed its spinoff from parent company Reckon. Related to the transaction, nQueue has merged with legal tech startup Zebraworks to form a new, independent, private company called nQueue Zebraworks, Inc. nQueue CEO Rick Hellers and Zebraworks CEO Bill Bice will serve as co-CEOs and have full management control. Hellers, Bice and Reckon are all shareholders in the company, which is now oversubscribed for its Series A funding round.
Zebraworks is the brainchild of former ProLaw and West km founder Bill Bice and is an integration platform to move the business and practice of law to the cloud. The company’s senior executives, all of whom have moved to nQueue, are all ProLaw and Thomson Reuters veterans. “This deal is about providing us with the opportunity to bring on Bill and his team and help take their vision to market,” says Hellers. “As the legal industry has quickly evolved to ‘work from anywhere,’ it has become clearer that firms need to run in the cloud. This deal positions us to deliver a wide cloud-based platform for both the business and practice of law.”
nQueue was founded in 2003. It holds four patents for embedded applications in multifunction devices and its print management, cost recovery and/or state-of-the-art scanning and routing technology is in 37 Am Law 100 firms. “Since its earliest days, nQueue built innovative tools around less paper, better process and the concept that technology helps lawyers be more efficient, productive and ultimately more profitable,” says Bice. “That philosophy, along with the company’s deep resources, is what makes it a perfect partner for building the cloud-based technology needed to deliver a higher level of service for firms and their clients.”
Bice and Hellers are both legal technology pioneers. Hellers has been at the forefront of every meaningful technology shift in the legal industry since the late 1970s. He began his career as CFO and director of technology for two major law firms before beginning a career at legal tech service providers in 1996. Since then he has led two successful companies, including nQueue which he co-founded in 2003. Bice was founder and CEO of ProLaw, the first all-in-one practice management solution for law firms, from 1990 until its acquisition by Thomson Reuters in 2001, where he launched the company’s revolutionary West km product. He was then a venture capitalist and CEO of a variety of tech companies until launching Zebraworks to build a cloud-based platform for legal in 2019. “Rick and Bill each have decades of experience leading legal tech organizations, and together they create a sort of alchemy. The combination of these two teams is much greater than the sum of their parts,” says Clive Rabie, Reckon Group chief executive officer. “The global legal services marketplace—which according to MarketLine has a value of $668 billion—will benefit from the unique and innovative solutions they create.”
In addition to vision and leadership, the combination will provide nQueue Zebraworks with augmented development resources to deliver on its technology road map. That road map includes more products based on the company’s new and innovative Queues ecosystem, new tools to help law firms manage collections and a complete end-to-end cloud-based platform for the business and practice of law. Products already in the works include ScanQ, which will allow scanning from mobile devices and the ability to manage and route scanned documents from anywhere, and CollectionQ, which will simplify firms’ processes around collecting invoices.
nQueue Zebraworks remains dedicated to providing outstanding products and services to law firms of all sizes. “We remain fully committed to all of our existing products and will continue to provide our legendary customer support to make sure our clients always receive the service they need,” adds Hellers. “At the same time, we look forward to creating new and improved offerings, especially for those firms ready to migrate to the cloud.”
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
About nQueue Zebraworks
nQueue Zebraworks provides software-based information workflow solutions to more than 35% of the largest 250 law firms in the United States, seven of the top 20 in the U.K., seven of the largest 35 in Australia and five of the top 10 globally. It provides scanning and routing, print management and cost recovery technology and cloud-based integration tools for the business and practice of law.