LawHawk Blog

As legal professionals, our lives revolve around email communication. I’ve tried Slack and Teams Chat, but I still prefer email, as long as it is easy for others to find and see emails when needed, and they are not locked away in Outlook, where only I can see them.

It's no wonder that any effective legal matter management solution must possess robust email management capabilities, as it’s one of the first things lawyers seek.

While most legal matter management solutions offer Outlook add-ins, their effectiveness varies.

Nowadays, many businesses heavily rely on Microsoft SharePoint, and legal teams would ideally like to store their emails alongside related documents in one central location and with all the security that comes with the Microsoft platform. Surprisingly, Microsoft hasn't made this process particularly user-friendly.

However, with help from our friends at The SharePoint Agency, we discovered OnePlace Solutions, an affordable and highly effective solution for seamless email and document management. After using it for nearly a year, we have found it to be an invaluable tool for our team. One reason that OnePlace Solutions is so strong is that email management isn’t just an add-on to what they really do – it’s their thing. They’ve also been very good at offering support where needed for the same reason.

One recurring challenge for legal teams in legal matter management is finding effective ways to train and inform the broader business on common issues.

The goal is to reduce the volume of enquiries and requests that flood the legal team, allowing the team to focus only on queries that truly require their expertise.

While certain legal matter management solutions offer functionality in this area, SharePoint stands out as a powerful tool for this purpose, given that it is already used by most legal teams and their business customers and has so many relevant features.

With its extensive range of features, SharePoint empowers legal teams to create flexible and intuitive resources, guiding the business towards the information they need when needed.

In legal matter management, few things are as vital as a well-designed intake process.

Without it, instructions can arrive from various channels like emails, phone calls, or in-person conversations (and often all of them!).

When there is no systematic method to capture this information, it often remains scattered across emails or locked away in people's minds. Consequently, it must be repeatedly entered into different documents or systems at different times.

This lack of organisation can lead to delays, necessitating clarifications and additional information requests. Moreover, it can spark disputes, with the business believing they provided instructions much earlier than the legal team believes is the case or with conflicting recollections about the requested information.

The absence of reliable data makes it more challenging for the legal team to actively manage matters, conduct reporting and analytics, and demonstrate their effective management of legal risks and opportunities for the business.

In the past few years, there’s been a tremendous increase in the adoption of legal matter management solutions.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions often boast an enticing feature known as auto redlining, enabling the automatic review of draft contracts by artificial intelligence (AI) to suggest changes. While this functionality may seem promising, its utility and effectiveness warrant closer examination.

I approach this feature with a degree of scepticism. Contracts represent a record of the collaborative arrangement between parties, leveraging their unique skills and experiences to create shared value. The question arises: Can AI, based on the analysis of countless contracts, truly capture and enhance the maximum value that can be achieved through collaboration by these two or more particular parties?

One of the standout features offered by comprehensive Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions is the ability to create and utilise playbooks within Microsoft Word. This functionality allows users to identify clauses they may disagree with and replace them with preferred alternatives or approved language, adding a layer of customisation and flexibility to contract drafting.

While this feature appears highly valuable, its practicality and adoption within teams may be questionable. Many organisations struggle to fully adopt and utilise even basic CLM functionality, making enhanced features like playbooks seem like a nice-to-have for future implementation rather than an immediate necessity.

Collaboration functionality is often touted as a significant advantage of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions, enabling seamless internal and external cooperation during the contract process. However, external collaboration, in particular, has its challenges. While it may seem impressive in demos, the reality is that it often requires the other party to change their established processes and work on a platform chosen by you. In practice, people are generally reluctant to change and may prefer to work on the contract in their own environment until they are satisfied, ultimately emailing it back. The functionality may not get used as much as hoped for.

The purpose of a contract is not to create a mere piece of paper or electronic document stored in a contract library. It also goes beyond just enabling a party to sue the other party when things go wrong. Instead, it serves as a tool to facilitate collaborative actions between parties, helping to achieve shared objectives. To achieve those objectives, effective contract management requires timely and accurate information about the agreed terms presented in a format that is easy for those responsible for delivering the contract objectives to comprehend. This lets parties understand their responsibilities, deadlines, standards, and financial obligations.

Within the Microsoft environment, there are key options available to enhance contract reporting and analytics:

If an organisation is a collection of contracts that cover everything the organisation buys and sells, then contract data is the new oil. But there can be a lot of data!

Utilising document automation to generate contracts provides the advantage of transforming every question in the questionnaire into valuable data that can be input into a contract database. Additionally, the capabilities of the document automation solution enable the creation of various additional data points through complex calculations on the initial data. However, when confronted with a multitude of data columns in a document library, it can be challenging for users to leverage this wealth of information effectively.

Fortunately, there are several options available to enhance the usefulness of contract views in SharePoint:

An essential requirement expressed by legal teams for their contract database, apart from the ability to perform easy full-text searches, is the ability to quickly identify upcoming expiry dates to avoid any omission and have sufficient time to take necessary actions.

How can this be done in a Microsoft environment?