In my earlier post, Quick Technology Wins for In-House Legal Teams in 2026, I noted that the speed of AI advancement appears to be causing many in-house legal teams to become even more paralysed, rather than able to move forward.
I suggested a good first step to unblock things is to talk to key stakeholders – finance and IT – and get their buy-in to explore options to improve the value that legal can deliver to the organisation.
A key message that is likely to resonate with them is that you will focus on getting the most out of the systems you already have, before looking for new solutions. That way, if you do find a gap in what you can get from your current systems, you'll be able to show what that gap is, why it exists, why it's important to close it, and the value that will come from doing that.
Based on this approach, in this post and those that follow, I’m going to focus on use cases for getting the most out of Microsoft 365, with just a few targeted add-ons. If the legal team’s appetite, supported by other stakeholders, is for a more ambitious overall legal and/or contract management platform, that’s awesome, but it’s a very different situation from where most teams appear to be.
Step 2 – Get off the Shared Drive and Onto SharePoint
Assuming you have initial buy-in from key stakeholders, particularly IT, the first thing I would recommend most legal teams do is to get their documents out of the shared drive that they are most likely stored in and into SharePoint.
Some teams have already made an initial move of getting documents into SharePoint, but, having taken a DIY approach, the way it has been done is not working well. As a result, different individuals have set up different sites with different structures, and it’s really not much better than what they had.
In either case, I recommend getting external help to set things up in a way that is stable, scalable, secure, and well-suited to AI. It’s a small cost for big long-term benefits.
The core concepts of setting up SharePoint for matter management are not that different across organisations, and there are well-proven methods you can use that will work really well and can be set up within days. When we work with The SharePoint Agency, we can often define the legal team's requirements and what a good structure would look like after a couple of hours in a workshop together. The SharePoint Agency has a prebuilt Microsoft Power App that can automatically build SharePoint sites for matters using that structure, based on a few initial fields of data.
With automatic creation, all your Matter sites can be appropriately tagged with metadata to make them easier to search and manage, and everyone on the team will know where to save and where to search. You can also manage access and security consistently with high standards, ensuring things are well set up for using AI within individual matters or across matters to get the most out of that technology as it evolves.
What to do with your existing documents?
You will need to decide what to do with your existing documents. You could initially leave them where they are, or – better - bring them all across into a single overall SharePoint site, where they will still be accessible and searchable, but without the effort that would be involved in setting up new sites for historic matters. That is what we did at LawHawk. Most of them will never be looked at again, so it may not be worth the effort, as you can find what you need if required.
As well as setting up your matter sites, you can also configure other key aspects of the legal team's SharePoint site to include knowledge management functionality, such as an opinions database, a library of training resources, and other useful material the team wants to share. You may as well do all of this at the same time. Even if you just set up the structure, you can then add materials as you find them.
You can also store your precedents and templates, where they can be easily found and maintained by the legal team. At a later point, you can identify which of those precedents would be most suitable for automation, either for the legal team to use, or ideally to enable at least some degree of self-service by the business.
