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

These solutions offer an array of impressive functionalities and continuous improvements that have excited legal teams with their promise of better ways to work. However, amidst this excitement, we’ve observed many projects that struggle to take off, falter at early stages, or fall into disuse after an initially promising start.

At the heart of this issue lies a disconnect between the capabilities these full-featured solutions offer and what legal teams and their business customers actually want and are capable of utilising.

In a recent workshop, the comment was made that it didn’t make much sense for a small legal team to have an entirely different platform to work on from the thousands of people across the rest of the organisation they wanted to collaborate with and support. Their query was whether they could do what they needed on SharePoint.

The purpose of this blog series is not to diminish the value of comprehensive legal matter management solutions, which hold substantial potential when implemented by organisations well-suited to their functionalities. We have good relationships with several legal matter management solution providers and make introductions and recommendations regularly where they are well suited for our customers’ requirements.

However, we’re all about outcomes, and it doesn’t serve anyone well in the long-term to have customers mismatched with solutions they don’t need, or can’t use, or that replicate what they already have.

Instead, in this series of posts, we aim to address the needs of those customers who either do not require the extensive functionality, face constraints in utilising it fully, or encounter budgetary or IT team limitations that prevent them from adopting a comprehensive solution. For these customers, a practical alternative must exist.

This series explores the practical options available to teams in such situations by leveraging the power of Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and complementary and affordable tools. While some may have bad recollections of older versions of SharePoint, the online solution has come a long way and these tools are well-suited to streamline specific high-priority aspects of the matter management process, not just the legal aspects. By implementing them, legal teams and the business units they support can achieve tangible benefits in their priority areas within a short timeframe, all at a price point that aligns with their organisational needs.

Follow the rest of the series as we delve into the world of practical legal matter management with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, and discuss how these tools can empower businesses to enhance their legal and compliance processes without needing a full legal matter management solution.

The topics covered in this series are listed below:

• Building a Solid Foundation: How can you build an Efficient Legal Intake Process in SharePoint?
• Unlocking Legal FAQs: Helping the Business to Help Themselves in SharePoint
• Better Email Management Options for SharePoint Users
• Mastering Document Chaos: Streamlined Document Management Options for in-house legal teams with SharePoint and OnePlace Documents
• Legal Team Analytics: How SharePoint and Power BI Can Showcase and Drive Legal Team Performance
• Rise Above the Scheduling Struggle: How Microsoft tools can simplify meetings
• How you can use Microsoft Teams Premium for more productive meetings
• How In-House Legal Teams Can Boost Collaboration and Productivity on Legal Matters with Microsoft’s Task Management Tools

Please let me know if you have additional queries you would like me to address.

Focus on outcomes

If you want better legal matter management outcomes and want to look at your options and get a practical assessment of which options will best suit you, get in touch. We can recommend and introduce you to full matter management solutions or help with more targeted interventions, depending on your needs.

Knowing what to do and knowing how to do it are different things. We would love to work with you to help you achieve the best outcomes, with certainty of costs and delivery.