BRCo & HILDEBRANDT MERGE

With last week's announcement that David Baker, left, (a longtime member of LTN's Editorial Advisory Board) was retiring from Baker Robbins & Co., I wasn't surprised to hear yesterday that Thomson Reuters' Hildebrandt International and  BRCo would merge. (TR also announced plans to lay off 240 employees in its legal businesses, according to The Wall Street Journal.)

Our colleague Zack Lowe reports in the development in yesterday's Am Law Daily:

The merger has been in the works since TR acquired BRCo in 2007, Bradford Hildebrandt said.

"He will continue to play a prominent role at the combined company while yielding day-to-day supervision to Baker CEO Brad Robbins and Hildebrandt managing director Jim Jones."

" 'It just makes enormous sense," Hildebrandt says. The two companies have been working together anyway, since a big part of helping firms become more efficient involves streamlining their tech systems,' he adds."

" 'Most firms are just not equipped with the technology to deal with changing business models the way they are going to be forced to,' Jones says. 'When you are billing all of your time on an hourly basis, the accounting system is pretty simple. But if a significant portion of your business--not a majority, but a significant portion — is based on flat fees and other alternative arrangements, the technology gets much more complicated,' " Lowe writes.

Read Lowe's complete report here.