“As we build out this gives us a way to provision all of our tools into the places where attorneys work. It’s a really strategic acquisition that helps us bring everything together.”
Litera has entered an agreement to acquire Prosperoware, in its latest major acquisition that will underpin Litera’s integration drive across its numerous systems and tools.
Prosperoware, co-founded by CEO Keith Lipman and CTO Sheetal Jain, is the vendor behind software-as-a-service enterprise platform CAM, which helps organisations to provision and govern their collaboration systems.
The strategy behind the acquisition is that it will help to provision all of Litera’s tools and make them available to attorneys where they work, particularly in Microsoft Teams.
Lipman and Jain will both join Litera, which says that all of Prosperoware’s employees have been offered a role.
Speaking with Legal IT Insider, Haley Altman, global director of business development and strategy, said: “We’ve been having conversations with Prosperoware for a while and looking at understanding CAM and how we could integrate Litera’s tools into it. We understand what they are trying to accomplish with their integration with Teams and we’ve been having conversations about how that can be expanded to encompass all the tools we have in our space.
“As we build out it gives us a way to provision all of our tools into the places where attorneys work. It’s a really strategic acquisition that helps us bring everything together.”
On top of its legacy drafting tools, Litera, through a series of 13 back-to-back acquisitions over the past two years, provides the likes of transaction management, contract review and business intelligence. Recent acquisitions include Kira Systems, Concep, DocsCorp and Foundation Software.
Altman says: “Each of our tools serve different aspects and pull together different data, but to make that work across tools requires the infrastructure that will provide that governance and provisioning. If you’re doing a transaction and you want to work with your document management system, with Kira, and with Clocktimizer, with CAM we can bring that all into Teams.”
With the move to hybrid work, law firms have been leveraging Teams heavily for internal collaboration and in many cases are looking at how to extend that. To find out more about how CAM helps to provision Teams see here: https://legaltechnology.com/2021/06/21/prosperoware-to-unveil-new-provisioning-features-for-teams-and-sharepoint-online/
And our interactive webinar with Prosperoware here: https://legaltechnology.com/2020/07/20/webinar-how-to-use-teams-for-matters-with-prosperoware/
For firms that are not planning on adopting or extending their adoption of Teams, Altman says that the Prosperoware acquisition still makes a lot of sense, commenting: “You still need to provision your users in the DMS and with drafting tools you want to understand who is working on this matter. Teams helps you to bring the workflows to life in a centralised location but being able to manage all of the tools and see who is accessing them, you need that single pane of glass to see who has access to this client.”
When you create a deal team, instead of having to add all of the users to each system, the ambition is that they will be automatically provisioned across all of the systems that you plan to use, and Altman says: “You can then save all that data back to the DMS.”
In terms of the timeframe, Altman says: “They can already do it with a number of different systems and have the connection to do the provisioning for Kira already.” Litera has already talked to a number of customers about the acquisition and Altman says that customers will help to drive the priorities moving forward.
In a statement, Douglas Calddell, global chief information officer at Mayer Brown, said: “The combination of Litera and Prosperoware is exciting since the blending of their technology offers a better experience across the firm’s global user community. Both are strategic vendors for Mayer Brown.”
“The addition of Prosperoware to the Litera family brings new possibilities of better DMS integration and governance for Transaction and deeper integration with Microsoft Teams,” said Vince Cordo, chief revenue and legal project management at Holland & Knight.
Prosperoware has its own partner network, including iManage and NetDocuments, which Altman says Litera views as “really important”.
In a statement out today (18 January), Litera’s CEO Avaneesh Marwaha said that the acquisition of Prosperoware would “help Litera execute its vision to transform the way legal teams collaborate.” He said: “The addition of Litera’s tools and other core applications into Prosperoware’s platform will automate the new matter, budget, and deal creation process and provide legal teams with a single pane of glass to view and manage their work.
“Further, this acquisition continues our commitment to partner with law firms to build connections between Litera tools and other core tools lawyers depend on to get their work done, including Microsoft Teams, iManage, NetDocuments, Windows File Shares, and other systems.”