Dye & Durham Ltd. DND-T is once again hiking its prices, this time on dozens of services the legal software company provides in its core Canadian, British and Australian markets.
For example, D&D’s eCore unit, one of two Ontario government-authorized service providers for obtaining provincial business entity documents, increased most list prices last month by 21 per cent, excluding tax and government fees.
It’s the third time eCore has upped list prices since spring 2022 after leaving them unchanged since before D&D’s 2017 purchase of its parent company, OnCorp. Direct Inc., according to updates to the latter’s archived website on Wayback Machine.
D&D’s list price to register or renew a business name in Ontario has increased by 400 per cent since early 2022 to $175.80 (excluding tax and government fees) from $35. (Law firms with contracts pay $100, up from $67.40 before the latest increase, D&D said.) Likewise, the list price to incorporate a for-profit Ontario company has gone up 430 per cent over the same period. Corporate search costs to find names and addresses of officers and directors have more than quadrupled.
Meanwhile, D&D is more than doubling the price of its newly acquired Ghost Practice legal practice management software next month, to $120 per user per month from $55.
The increases are part of an internal review and affect some products whose prices haven’t changed in years. D&D chief executive officer Matthew Proud said the increases relate to the “significant investment” the company has made in its products and the fact that some prices lagged rivals. For example, according to the Law Society of Alberta, Ghost Practice was one of the least expensive software products for lawyers in the province to manage their firms. Now it will be one of the most expensive, though still cheaper than rival Leap Legal.
“Our products deliver massive value for our customers,” Mr. Proud said. “Our pricing is not always reflective of this. As we’re investing a lot in our business, we need to make sure that we drive the appropriate revenue and earnings for our shareholders.”
Price increases are not unique to D&D: Fellow legal software consolidators including PC Law and Leap have also hiked prices after making acquisitions. Other software vendors have raised prices in response to inflation, including giant Salesforce Inc., which hiked list fees by nine per cent in August, its first increases in seven years.
Previous price hikes by D&D have been met with outcry from clients because of the their size and scope. In January, 2021, weeks after D&D bought Canada’s dominant real-estate transaction processing software provider DoProcess LP, it told clients in Ontario it would hike its fee to $129 per deal, from $25. Some customers complained, saying it would force higher costs onto home buyers. D&D later upped prices in other provinces, then increased prices again.
The hikes prompted dozens of complaints to the Competition Bureau of Canada and a class action lawsuit, although an Ontario Superior Court judge last spring declared in a procedural ruling “there is no real evidence” the lead plaintiffs suffered loss of business. Prices for those real-estate services, now offered through D&D’s Unity platform, are not changing in the new wave of increases.
Concerns over reduced competition and high fees prompted Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority in 2022 to force D&D to divest its purchase of legal software provider TM Group (U.K.) Ltd., which it did in July.
D&D has said the complaints don’t translate into any notable loss of business. Mr. Proud said that since the company implemented the eCore price increases, just four per cent of communications to its contact centre were related to the move.
“We have a very sticky customer base that values our products,” he said. “We anticipate very low churn from this.”
Media organizations, including The Globe and Mail, routinely rely on access to corporate records for news gathering. D&D has one rival for the service, ESC Corporate Services Ltd., owned by Information Services Corp. ISV-T There used to be another competitor, Cyberbahn, but D&D bought that from Thomson Reuters Corp. TRI-T in 2019. eCore recently told customers its cost to obtain corporate reports would nearly double, to $64.50 each. By contrast, the service is free or costs less than $10 per file in most provinces.
The hikes follow a selloff in D&D stock last month after it forecast operating profits in its next quarter would fall slightly below expectations. BMO Capital Markets analyst Thanos Moschopoulos said in a note the stock was “undervalued” given D&D’s earnings profile “during a challenging point in the cycle” and its ability to capitalize when property deal volumes recover.
D&D spokesman Wojtek Dabrowski said the company had not increased the fees it charges the public for the use of government products or services that it provides under license in relation to the Ontario Business Registry.