Ayala unit buys NY company

MANILA, Philippines - Integreon Managed Solutions, Inc., a knowledge process outsourcing firm controlled by Ayala Corp., has acquired New York-based Datum Legal, Inc. for about $10 million to boost its legal process outsourcing business. Datum Legal is a litigation support and electronic data discovery company based in Manhattan, New York. It processes, manages and analyzes companies’ legal documents. In a briefing, Integreon Country Head Erik J. Tabuena said they had bought the Manhattan firm through a capital infusion from LiveIT Solutions, Inc. "We’re leveraging on the strengths [of Datum Legal] and we believe this will take us further as we would like to be very responsive to clients’ desire to lower and also control costs," said Alfredo I. Ayala, chief executive of LiveIT Solutions, Inc. LiveIT is the business process outsourcing unit of conglomerate Ayala Corp., which also has businesses in utilities, telecommunications and real estate development. Mr. Ayala said its outsourcing units benefit from the US economic slowdown as companies try to cut costs by outsourcing some of their operations to countries like the Philippines and India. Integreon, which has 400 professionals reviewing litigation documents for law firms, had set a per-document price for their services that Mr. Ayala said would save companies between 40% and 80%. With Datum Legal, Integreon can now archive document cases that will be put in a database that legal reviewers can access over the Internet. - BusinessWorld