How Nelson Mullins improves knowledge sharing with Intapp Workspaces

Putting technology to the test with a pilot group

Before launch, the firm’s IT professionals put Microsoft Teams to work in their own department, with the goal of identifying and addressing any gaps or issues before introducing Teams firmwide. The group quickly realized that because it was so easy to create teams at will and without oversight, data sprawl would quickly become a problem.

“To get buy-in from our lawyers and prevent chaos as they tried to organize and find the right Teams for collaboration by client or matter, we needed a more intuitive and controlled user experience,” Worth said.

“As IT leaders, we needed the ability to control that chaos, and that’s really where Intapp Workspaces came in,” added Carrillo.

By integrating with existing legal software systems, Intapp Workspaces enables firms to centralize matter management and content organization across all their offices via Microsoft Teams throughout the matter lifecycle.

Following implementation of both Intapp Workspaces and Microsoft Teams, Carrillo formed a pilot group to develop best practices. “I recruited a group of equity partners and told them, ‘Next time you open a client matter, let’s get you working in this environment. This is a powerful new tool for your toolbox that will bring you greater efficiency.’”

“Once the partners understood that they could form a matter-centric team in a closed environment, it was a huge win,” said Carrillo. The pilot group also appreciated that they could stop relying solely on email, since with Intapp Workspaces, all communications are organized by matter in the teams themselves.

These new capabilities resulted in greater efficiency for the equity partners, who shared their successes with their colleagues. Persuaded by their colleagues’ enthusiasm, eventually more and more of the firm’s lawyers decided to adopt the technology.

Integrating with an existing DMS

Intapp Workspaces has also helped Nelson Mullins optimize its existing document management system and allow its practitioners to co-author documents in real time.

With Intapp Workspaces’ content connector, firm lawyers can combine the capabilities of their existing DMS with Microsoft Teams to co-author documents without compromising security. By extending the power of Nelson Mullins’ existing document management system (DMS), Intapp Workspaces complements the investments in software the firm has already made.

“We needed our document management system to be the best, which is why we were looking for tools to integrate with our DMS, but not take its place,” said Carrillo.

As an additional benefit, “You always know you have the current document with [Intapp] Workspaces because it’s the document that’s saved into the Microsoft team,” Carrillo said. “You’ll never again wonder, ‘Am I looking at the correct revision of the document?’”

Collaborating with clients to accelerate work and improve communication

With the legal-specific enhancements that Intapp Workspaces provides, Nelson Mullins’ lawyers quickly got comfortable using Microsoft Teams for internal matter collaboration. Soon after, lawyers began hearing that their clients wanted to collaborate in real time too.

First, though, the IT department needed to ensure that ethical walls and sound governance processes could be maintained. “External collaboration was something new, so we had to work with our security team on it,” explained Carrillo.

Once Nelson Mullins had the right processes in place, they experimented with external co-authoring. Because Intapp Workspaces runs natively on the cloud-based Microsoft Azure platform, the firm only needed to create Azure guest accounts for its clients to enable safe, secure client collaboration.

Now, Carillo said, “As long as the client has the right licensing with Microsoft, client collaboration is the easiest thing to do. It’s more efficient for our attorneys and our clients to work collaboratively,” since co-authoring eliminates version control problems and minimizes the risk of document corruption during multiple back and forth exchanges over email.

And, Carillo added, “If your client’s tied into the team, they can send message to their lawyers at any time, so they’re more likely to get a quick response” — providing yet another valuable improvement to the client experience.

Intapp Workspaces “is our ‘Easy’ button,” Worth concluded. “As CIO, I don’t have to worry about figuring out how to manage the archiving or compliance, as this suite takes all of that pain away. [Intapp] is so aligned with us, it’s fantastic.”