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With many legal technology systems moving from their traditional homes on internal servers and behind firewalls into the cloud, law firm and legal department IT administrators increasingly have to abandon previous strategies and devise new management structures. While many traditionally relied on SQL, the database language used to query large systems, IT personnel now find themselves having to wade through various APIs to manage new cloud-based systems.

Legal software group Prosperoware this week launched CAM, a set of tools intended to help companies navigate their various cloud systems under one unified platform. Prosperoware CEO and co-founder Keith Lipman intends for CAM to serve as an “integrated management layer across a variety of applications.” The transition to the cloud, he said, has forced IT administrators to find new ways to query for content across systems, often using SQL.

“When these [systems] were behind the firewall, IT could integrate systems together very easily,” Lipman explained. “Basically, as they've moved into the cloud, now management is much harder because they can't use that SQL language they're all familiar with.”

CAM is split into two components: CAM Provisioning and CAM ContentMirror. CAM ContentMirror is a cloud-based work space that pulls content from various cloud-based platforms, while CAM Provisioning is a way to index and locate content drawn from various different cloud systems. At present, CAM ContentMirror works with iManage, NetDocuments, Microsoft Office 365 and Kira Systems, but will later expand to include more content management platforms.

Lipman said part of the advantage of a system like CAM ContentMirror is that it ensures content from cloud-based systems is available to work on, even when those cloud-based systems aren't working themselves. “Clouds do go down, just like internal systems. There are outages. What do you do to make sure that business doesn't stop during an outage?” he said.

More broadly, Lipman wants the CAM products to help organizations tie together all the various cloud-based systems they need to conduct business. “Where you draft may not be where you collaborate. There is a fluidity,” he said.

Historically, Prosperoware has primarily worked with law firm clients, but Lipman said the company, like many legal tech vendors today, is interested in expanding its offerings to corporate legal departments. And given the expansion of law departments and interest in corporate legal operations, the shifting focus has “gone from opportunistic to strategic.”