How legal matter management software enables effective, compliant use of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Copilot, and AI tools
For every type of law firm professional — including knowledge managers, lawyers, IT professionals, and chief operating officers — legal matter management software offers a different set of important benefits.
Below we look at the specific advantages that each of these groups gains with the legal matter management software Intapp Workspaces — as well as how this software facilitates effective, compliant use of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Copilot, and other AI tools.
Legal matter management software helps knowledge managers organize knowledge
Successful law firm knowledge managers (also known as legal knowledge managers) need all of their firm’s knowledge well organized and easily searchable and retrievable. This knowledge includes all matter work the firm is carrying out, which can inform how the firm works on related matters.
Intapp Workspaces makes it easier for knowledge managers to capture and organize matter information. Intapp Workspaces connects to your financial management system or intake system to automatically pull in client-matter codes when you create matter teams in Microsoft Teams.
These client-matter codes serve as metadata that attach to a team and all the team’s content. With legal work increasingly occurring in Microsoft Teams, corresponding client-matter codes for each matter team are crucial to tracking those matters.
By assigning client-matter codes to your matter teams, Intapp Workspaces also makes it easier for Microsoft Copilot and Viva Topics to distinguish between different matters. These two Microsoft tools for knowledge management use AI to surface relevant information.
For example, Microsoft Viva Topics uses AI to “identify topics in your Microsoft 365 environment” and automatically fill in information on these topics. In the context of a law firm, these topics would include particular matters.
Imagine your law firm has created multiple teams for a matter involving a merger for two telecommunications companies. Because Intapp Workspaces has assigned all these teams the correct client and matter codes, Microsoft Viva Topics will automatically pull from all these teams when it creates the topic for this matter.
On the other hand, if your firm isn’t using Intapp Workspaces, it might not be clear which teams pertain to this matter. In that case, Microsoft Viva Topics might pull information from some of the right teams but not all of them, resulting in a topic that is incomplete and misleading.
An incomplete topic is the last thing a knowledge manager wants.
Likewise, without Intapp Workspaces, requests that team members submit in Microsoft Copilot may result in Copilot generating incomplete drafts. For example, let’s say, one of your associates asks Microsoft Copilot to create a summary of all work your firm has done for a particular client.
Because you’re not using Intapp Workspaces, not all teams relating to that client may mention the client’s name in the team name. As a result, Microsoft Copilot may miss some of the teams that carried out work relating to the client.
In contrast, with Intapp Workspaces, which assigns the correct client codes to each team, Microsoft Copilot can easily find and surface all the firm’s client work.
For these reasons, Intapp Workspaces helps knowledge managers organize the firm’s work in a way that makes it easily searchable and retrievable.
Legal matter management software helps lawyers work more efficiently
For your firm’s lawyers, the biggest value that Intapp Workspaces legal matter management software offers is a new, more efficient way of working on matters.
If a lawyer is working on multiple cases or deals without the benefit of Intapp Workspaces, they have to operate across multiple windows, including Microsoft Outlook and Word, their browser, and other applications for each matter. They’re going to struggle to keep all their needed tasks sorted.
But with Intapp Workspaces, each matter gets a defined workspace that contains all the programs, documents, and messages needed for handling that matter. Thus, for a lawyer working on multiple cases, each case has its own workspace, and the lawyer only has to switch between matter tabs.
This organized, efficient way of working saves lawyers time and lowers their stress. They don’t have to mentally keep track of where every piece of information exists — and they don’t have to keep 30 tabs open in a browser, either.
Legal matter management software conserves IT resources for high-value projects
Intapp Workspaces also makes work life easier for your IT professionals.
Without this type of legal matter management software, your IT staff might find their days consumed by low-value busy work, like creating matter teams for lawyers and trying to gather and organize matter-related data.
Intapp Workspaces eliminates the need for your IT staff to perform these tasks. Instead, lawyers can easily create their own correctly provisioned teams, customized to their practice area. And because Intapp Workspaces assigns client and matter codes to the teams it creates in Microsoft Teams, data relating to each matter is organized and easy to find.
With these tasks already handled, your IT professionals can focus their time on more critical IT projects. Your IT team will also appreciate that Intapp Workspaces prevents Microsoft Teams sprawl through auto-archiving of inactive teams and concluded matters.
Legal matter management software improves overall operations through innovation
Additional beneficiaries of legal matter management software include your firm’s chief operating officer (COO) and chief innovation officer.
Because of the COOs’ focus on overall operational efficiency, they will appreciate a solution that can improve operations in at least three different areas — including knowledge management, legal work, and IT services.
Law firm chief innovation officers will also value a solution like Intapp Workspaces, which offers innovations that enable modern legal work.
Legal matter management software — combined with Intapp Walls — helps general counsel sleep at night
The AI capabilities in Microsoft Viva Topics, Copilot, and other software can sometimes surface information that should be behind ethical walls.
At Intapp, we know this risk worries law firm general counsel. But with Intapp Walls integrated with Intapp Workspaces, users can only surface and view information that they’re permitted to see.
Here’s how these two programs work together: Intapp Workspaces assigns client and matter codes to teams and SharePoint Sites. Intapp Walls then uses those codes to enforce the permissions rules established in its policy engine.
For example, the policy engine may have a rule that no one who worked on matter 205C can view information from matter 407B. When an associate who worked on matter 205C requests Microsoft Copilot to carry out a task, Intapp Walls will in effect tell Microsoft Copilot to exclude any information from matter 407B.
This ethical-wall-enforcing function gives law firm general counsel the peace of mind that they can use these powerful new AI tools without creating ethical problems.
Legal matter management software has wide organizational value
Please contact us to learn more about how Intapp Workspaces can impact all your law firm professionals.