TL;DR: The company couldn’t out-feature incumbents, but it could out-position them and give buyers a reason to rethink what “good enough” meant.
The growth challenge: Entering a market dominated by incumbents
The company was a leader in legal hold software, but legal hold represented only a small portion of corporate legal departments’ budgets.
The much larger opportunity was e-discovery: collecting, processing, and reviewing evidence for litigation. The market was roughly 20x larger than legal hold.
The problem: The market was locked down.
The leading competitors had spent roughly a decade building sophisticated e-discovery platforms, developing deep customer relationships, and becoming embedded in legal professionals’ workflows. Many users were certified on their platforms and had little reason to switch.
Catching up feature for feature would take years. Even if the company eventually matched the competition, customers would have little reason to change.
The company needed another way in.
The competitive wedge: Finding a use case incumbents had missed
Customer interviews revealed an overlooked opportunity: not every legal matter required the sophistication of an enterprise e-discovery platform.
A small number of high-stakes litigation matters consumed most of the legal department’s e-discovery resources. Those were exactly the cases the major platforms were built to handle.
But a much larger volume of matters was far more lightweight:
- Early assessments of whether a case even existed
- Internal investigations
- Routine employment matters
- Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in the public sector
For these use cases, existing platforms were often overkill. Teams paid for more complexity than they needed, relied on outside law firms for basic work, and waited weeks for answers.
The opportunity wasn’t to displace incumbents in enterprise e-discovery. It was to offer a simpler alternative for routine litigation, the work their complex platforms weren’t built to handle efficiently.
The growth move: Competing on a different playing field
The company positioned its e-discovery product around a fundamentally different value proposition: simple, fast, affordable e-discovery for routine matters that in-house legal teams could run themselves.
Rather than trying to convince buyers that the company had built a better version of an established platform, the strategy gave them a different reason to buy.
The positioning focused on ease of use, speed, control, and affordability rather than an endless list of features. In-house teams could handle routine e-discovery themselves, reducing the dependence on outside counsel, avoiding unnecessary software costs, and getting answers faster while reducing risk.
The product also gave legal professionals a more valuable role in their organizations: they could do more of the work themselves instead of handing routine matters off to outside firms.
The GTM strategy: Creating buyer confidence in a new approach
The biggest barrier to adoption wasn’t just product awareness. It was end-user confidence.
Legal teams had traditionally outsourced much of this work. Even if the product was easier to use, buyers needed to believe they could successfully conduct e-discovery themselves.
So the launch strategy focused on giving them that confidence.
The company took the new e-discovery story on the road through a user group roadshow, starting with its loyal legal hold community. After a morning workshop on legal hold, the afternoon introduced e-discovery. Every attendee received a login to a demo environment containing a mock case and a challenge: Be the first to find the smoking gun.
Solutions engineers and customer success managers answered questions and helped participants get hands-on with the platform. Instead of asking customers to believe that the product was easier to use, the launch let them experience it for themselves.
The result: 125% increase in average order value
The strategy opened an entry point into a market that at first seemed impossible to penetrate.
The roadshow generated the company’s first wave of e-discovery adopters, who became early revenue sources and valuable product feedback, helping refine the offering and build momentum.
The company expanded beyond its original legal hold category, with average order value increasing 125% as customers adopted e-discovery alongside legal hold.
More importantly, it established a credible position in a market where the leading competitors had a decade-long head start.
The takeaway: You don’t have to catch an incumbent to compete with one.
When a market leader has a massive product advantage, the answer isn’t always to build until you can match it. Find the customers, use cases, or buying criteria the incumbent isn’t serving well, and build your strategy around that opening.
The best wedge into an entrenched market may not be a better product. It may be a better reason to buy, aimed at a narrower need.