Trinity Hunt Builds Litigation-Services Platform

After acquiring Deposition Solutions as a platform company in February, Trinity Hunt Partners just completed its first add-on. Managing partner Pete Stein says that in the near future, the firm expects to triple or even quadruple the revenue and profitability of the platform.

Dallas-based private equity firm Trinity Hunt Partners (THP) is moving quickly to bolster its litigation-support-services platform with the announcement of its most recent acquisition, Stratos Legal Records. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Stratos deal, closed in July, represents the first add-on acquisition to Deposition Solutions, the platform portfolio company THP acquired in February. Since then, says Pete Stein, managing partner at THP, the firm has doubled the revenues and profitability of Deposition Solutions. Looking into the near future, Stein says the firm expects to triple or even quadruple the revenues and profitability of the platform company in the next three to four years.

“This is a business in which we have a highly talented management team,” Stein says.

Stratos, headquartered in Houston, will function as a division of Deposition Solutions, all the while keeping its current team of managers. Stratos is focused on the medical records retrieval services business, while Deposition Solutions provides customers with similar services for the legal profession. In fact, records retrieval makes up half of Deposition Solution’s revenues and 60 percent of EBITDA, according to Stein. The business also provides outsourced legal processing, court reporting, and videography. Stratos’ medical records retrieval expertise will provide synergies with Deposition Solutions’ professional services.

THP made both investments from its Fund IV, a $211M vehicle closed in December 2013. Portfolio companies are typically entrepreneurial and family-owned, with between $3M and $15M in EBITDA. The firm focuses on the industrial products and services, business services, and healthcare services sectors.

THP started as the private investment office to the Lamar Hunt family, which currently constitutes about half of its activities and is now a private equity firm focused on more traditional transactions typically found in the asset class. THP has invested more than $1.3B in more than 50 platform companies throughout the Southwest, Southeast, and lower Midwest regions.

Stein says he is excited about the record retrieval add-on, describing it as a stable business, less volatile than most sectors and somewhat non-cyclical. And if all goes according to plan, THP could be consolidating more of this niche business.