In today’s environment, it’s unlikely that every member of your company’s legal operations team will want to return to the office in person full-time, and the option to work from home has become practically mandatory for many candidates in today’s tight hiring market. Once, a dispersed team model would have been difficult to navigate — but today, thanks to modern technology and virtual models[1], employers and legal operations teams can seamlessly connect their remote professionals.
To support and foster more dynamic models of working, organizations must standardize their common core technology platforms across their different functions. To help employers blend traditional and remote workplaces with greater fluidity, Microsoft has built, and continues to update, its cloud-based Microsoft 365 platform and product suite.
To help remote legal teams work even more effectively while making the most of their organization’s existing investment in Microsoft 365, Intapp Documents for Corporate Legal was designed by corporate legal professionals to deliver purpose-built functionality that works with both Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams.
Offering comprehensive, intuitive matter lifecycle management capabilities, Intapp Documents for Corporate Legal seamlessly harnesses and files content to Microsoft SharePoint or other preferred repository. It also allows remote team members to continue working without an Internet connection — an essential feature when your professionals are on the road. It even optimizes document co-authoring among dispersed teams by saving only the changes to content — ensuring uninterrupted collaboration even if a remote team member has a slow or intermittent network connection.
Enhancing security and compliance
When it comes to the critical issue of matter content security, Microsoft delivers by ensuring that its Microsoft 365 products have the latest security controls — relieving information managers and IT departments of much of the stress, time, and cost caused by legal professionals accessing, working on, and collaborating on content outside of company firewalls. In fact, Microsoft’s provisions extend to controls that help administrators ensure content doesn’t move out of designated jurisdictions. So if, for example, a matter’s data and documents must stay within Europe to maintain compliance, you can easily set those parameters with the software.
Built on top of Microsoft 365, Intapp Documents for Corporate Legal allows for even greater granularity of controls. For instance, in-house legal teams can publish documents to an external portal where only partner firms or approved external legal experts can access them — thereby restricting access, and strengthening security, even further.
Because Intapp security builds on the existing provisions of Microsoft 365, conditional rights access automatically cascades through to legal matter activity. That means that even if legal team members use their own devices to access matter information, for example, it’s easy to establish checks to ensure that their security settings and antivirus protection are up to date before any access to sensitive content is permitted.
Seamlessly connecting legal operations team members, processes, and data
By enabling a seamless transition between office-based and remote team members, Intapp Documents for Corporate Legal stands apart from the costly legacy legal document management systems that in-house legal operations have traditionally used. Those systems, which are often on-premises, hinder organizations from successfully adopting remote or hybrid environments. Even when such systems are cloud-based, they usually cannot seamlessly connect data and process across different preferred platforms, or when professionals are working offline.
Intapp Documents for Corporate Legal gives professionals the freedom to choose how and where they work. By offering workplace flexibility, organizations will have a better chance of retaining their valued employees, as well as drawing new talent from a wider range of locations and time zones.
The future will be more dynamic than many company leaders realize. The only way to prepare for that eventuality is to plan for it today.
Learn more about how Intapp Documents for Corporate Legal can connect your legal operations teams.
[1] Victoria Basham, “Covid-19 remote working has increased the internal standing of in-house legal teams, survey finds,” The Global Legal Post (September 19, 2021).