Managing a wave of acquisitions

MULTIPLE ACQUISITIONS are part of the strategic culture at WordWave, as CTO Lisa Censullo can attest from firsthand experience. They have presented her with some of her biggest technical and managerial challenges.

As the Boston-based court reporting, transcription, and videography company's first CTO, she functions as an agent of change. In just 18 months, WordWave gobbled up 19 smaller companies.

Upon joining the company after a phone call from WordWave President and CEO Perry Solomon, Censullo began immediately working alongside the company's top brass to think through the technical implications of each acquisition.

"When I started in April 1999, there were no standardized systems and processes to make these different, smaller companies part of a larger company," Censullo remembers. "I had to start from scratch on things like the standards we would use so we could communicate and share files."

Now pursuing different strategic business lines centered on digitized transcription and searchable multimedia, WordWave is up to 445 employees and retains another 1,500 outsourced workers.

WordWave was started in 1997 as LegaLink, which has since become a division of WordWave working with law firms that often need to obtain depositions from people in scattered locations using synchronized text/video depositions and multimedia trial presentations.

But WordWave is growing far beyond its court-reporting roots. The cultural challenges in bringing employees from so many separate companies into the WordWave fold have tested Censullo's management skills.

"Of all of the issues that became part of my job, the cultural differences were certainly the more difficult [issues], not the technology problems. Those you can fix," Censullo says.

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