The July 14 meeting of the Intapp Legal Modern Work Consortium offered its law firm chief information officer (CIO) members insights into how their peers are using legal technology to enable a modern work experience and usher in the future of legal work. Other topics presented during the meeting of the new group, which is still taking on members, included the consortium’s plans for ILTACON.
Using legal technology to enhance the attorney and client collaboration experience
Guest legal technology specialists from two Am Law 200 law firms shared with the consortium how their firms facilitate team-based collaboration through Intapp Workspaces.
Prior to implementing Intapp Workspaces, these firms’ professionals were scouring their inboxes for matter information. In contrast, with Intapp Workspaces, which optimizes Microsoft Teams, matter-based teams now serve as convenient, organized containers of matter information.
Intapp Workspaces also enables law firms to easily check out documents from their legacy document management systems (DMSs) and co-author the documents within the team for the matter.
Before working in this way, these two firms, which have offices across the country, often struggled to collaborate on files. Lawyers from different offices would send attachments to one another multiple times throughout a matter’s lifecycle, and at the end of the process, the file would be corrupted, or the team would harbor doubts as to whether they had the most current, complete version of the document.
With Intapp Workspaces and its Content Connector tab, which allows professionals to check documents into and out of the DMS right within their team, these firms now easily co-author a variety of different file types, including —
- Legal briefs
- PowerPoint presentations to clients
- Documents relating to requests for proposals (RFPs)
- Excel spreadsheets
“With Microsoft Teams and Intapp Workspaces, the integration that we have with our document management system has been critical for us,” said one of the guest speakers.
In addition, one of the firms gives clients guest access to the team, so that they can efficiently interact with their lawyers and review co-authored files. Prior to giving these clients access, the firm makes sure to inform teams that the client will have access.
Without leaving their digital workspace, these firms’ lawyers also rely upon other Microsoft 365 programs, such as Microsoft Excel, Planner, and OneNote, to create other assets in the team, such as tracking sheets, lists of tasks, or important notes.
Preparing for the future
The guest speakers and consortium members also discussed their predictions and preparations for future changes in legal work. For example, one of the guest speakers indicated that her Am Law 200 firm is investigating how to use Microsoft Azure AI. One of the consortium members is likewise researching how the AI capabilities of Microsoft Copilot may change how their firm works.
The other guest speaker sees document automation — automatically assembling a document using information and data from other sources — as an innovation on the horizon.
Planning for ILTACON
You can connect with the consortium at ILTACON, where the consortium will have a session right before the CIO meeting. Entitled “Intapp Legal Modern Work Consortium at ILTACON 2023,” the session will include a presentation from Microsoft as well as a peer presentations from consortium members on use cases for Microsoft 365 tools.
If you’d like to learn more about how Intapp is transforming legal work, you can read more here.