Manatt improves firm collaboration and data governance with Intapp Workspaces and Microsoft Teams

Implementing Microsoft Teams for better governance

Manatt’s professionals largely encompass two distinct roles: lawyers and health care consultants. To help both groups stay current on technology, the IT group meets with them regularly.

It was at one such meeting that the professionals said that they wanted to adopt the same collaboration tools that their clients used. The IT group quickly identified Microsoft Teams as the right firm collaboration tool for the firm — but the team knew that they first needed to establish strong data governance and security protocols before rolling it out to their users.

Enhancing the user experience with Intapp Workspaces

In addition to improving client collaboration, Manatt’s team wanted to ensure a smooth user experience that would integrate with systems the firm already had in place.

“We wanted a third-party solution to address the concerns we knew we were going to have,” Heim said. As Heim’s group evaluated potential solutions, they explored the many features of Intapp Workspaces for Microsoft Teams. A few differentiators emerged:

• The user experience is clean and simple
• The software securely integrates with Aderant and iManage, which Manatt uses to store matter data
• The administrative management process is straightforward and easy to use, which would ease the burden of the firm’s IT group

Integrating task management with Microsoft Planner

Shortly after launching Intapp Workspaces for Microsoft Teams, the Manatt IT group expanded access to other Microsoft 365 applications, including Microsoft Planner. Through targeted Planner training, the firm’s professionals were able to easily organize projects while simultaneously collaborating via Microsoft Teams.

The team’s strategy to encourage users to integrate both tools into their workflow paid off. The consulting division, in particular, now relies heavily on Planner as their project management solution. “The ability to introduce other applications, in particular Planner, was a nice by-product of this initiative. This was a really, really big win,” says Heims.

Now that Manatt professionals are using dynamic technologies to organize work and create pathways to productive collaboration, the organization is thriving. It’s been so successful, in fact, that it’s the firm’s leadership are now the biggest boosters of Intapp Workspaces for Microsoft Teams and Planner. “The firm looks to this platform to collaborate and eventually share externally,” Heim explains.

Measuring success firmwide

Manatt has achieved significant efficiencies with Intapp Workspaces for Microsoft Teams since its go-live, and is achieving continuous improvements as additional groups throughout the organization embrace it. Successes so far have included:

• Health care consultants are more effectively communicating, collaborating, and engaging in large-scale project management
• Firm professionals are improving the client experience by meeting their clients’ demands for Microsoft Teams collaboration
• Real estate lawyers are saving time by creating new documents using familiar templates
• Tax lawyers are using Intapp Workspaces’ firm-specific workflows in Microsoft Planner to more easily organize matter tasks, and leveraging Microsoft Teams to more effectively collaborate on documents via the iManage integration
• The IT group is using Microsoft Teams for all of its project work, including tracking moving tasks, storing historical and referential data, establishing channels for applications, and communicating knowledge with the help desk

“It’s made all of our project work more efficient and effective,” says Heim.