Enabling secure collaboration with Intapp Workspaces, Intapp Walls, and Microsoft Teams
If your law firm is considering implementing Intapp Walls or Intapp Workspaces, you likely have questions about how these products work with each other as well as any third-party software you rely on, such as Microsoft Teams and your document management system (DMS).
To help address these common client concerns, we spoke with Colin Truesdale, Intapp’s Global Head of Presales for the Intapp Collaboration & Content suite. He shared his answers to commonly asked questions about these products’ integrations with each other and third-party software, and explained how they can help law firms promote security, ensure compliance, and improve collaboration.
How do Intapp Workspaces and Intapp Walls work separately and together?
Intapp Workspaces optimizes Microsoft Teams to meet the unique needs of law firms. For example, Intapp Workspaces brings matter information from your firm’s business systems to create template-driven, collaborative teams. Users can easily view matter information and collaborate on documents from the teams they have access to — without ever needing to switch between applications.
Sold separately from Intapp Workspaces, Intapp Walls integrates with and automatically enforces your ethical walls across more than 25 software programs, including Intapp Workspaces and any other Intapp products, Microsoft Teams, leading CRM systems, and time and billing software.
For example, if you’ve created an ethical wall that prohibits lawyers who are working on Retail Data, Inc. matters from working on matters related to its competitor, Ecommerce Analytics, your firm’s lawyers can’t breach that wall — inadvertently or intentionally — when in Microsoft Teams. And if a lawyer tries to manually add someone from the Ecommerce Analytics matter to the Retail Data, Inc. team in Microsoft Teams, the software will prevent this and notify the lawyer that the action goes against your firm’s ethical walls.
If a document from my DMS has specific access permissions and is checked out through Microsoft Teams, will those permissions transfer, and will the document show as checked out in the DMS?
One of the major benefits of Intapp Walls is that it provides consistency in the security of your various systems, including across your DMS and teams created by Intapp Workspaces. This ensures the matter team has the same permissions as the DMS workspace for the matter.
When you check out a document through Microsoft Teams using the Intapp Workspaces Content Connector tab, the document will show as checked out in the DMS as well. As a result, you don’t have to worry about multiple staff members unknowingly working on the same document directly in the DMS. Once checked out to a team, you can then leverage Microsoft 365’s transformative co-authoring capabilities to edit the document with others in real time, and you can send Teams notifications to inform others about the status of a document.
Once you’re ready, you can check the document back into your DMS from Microsoft Teams using the Intapp Workspaces Content Connector, saving the document as a new version or replacing the existing version.
Does Intapp Workspaces enable law firms to create client teams and matter teams in Microsoft Teams?
Yes, Intapp Workspaces lets you automatically create templated teams for both clients and matters, and makes it easier for users to access them.
When using Microsoft Teams out of the box, professionals must know the name of the team they’re searching for; otherwise, they must search through the full list of teams. There’s also no relationship between teams for clients and teams for client matters, so users can’t easily find and view associated teams.
Intapp Workspaces links associated teams so you can easily find and access the information you need. You can select a client’s team to view a list of matters for that client, then select a matter to access that matter’s team.
Within the optimized version of Microsoft Teams that you gain with Intapp Workspaces, you can access your different teams from customizable dashboards and review high-level information on each of them. The software can categorize matters for a specific client team by work type, lead, status, and other crucial factors.
You can also create hierarchies of teams; for example, a client team may be a high-level team while the client’s individual matters are lower-level teams. Intapp Walls will apply all your compliance standards and permissions to each team, regardless of its level. If one individual matter is more locked down than others, you can adjust the security for that team.
What type of audit logging is available?
Intapp audits data including security changes, which teams are created, and which documents are checked in and out of the DMS. You can review details about these updates to learn more about when they were made and who made them.
Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview also audit document edits and versions to further help you keep track of important changes. Additionally, with comprehensive integrated logging, Intapp Walls lets you easily present a documented audit trail if required to do so by the court, clients, or government agencies.
If access permissions are updated within Intapp Walls, will Intapp Workspaces automatically reflect those updates?
Intapp Workspaces consistently checks teams against your walls. If the walls change, then Intapp Workspaces will enforce those changes and automatically remove people who no longer have permission to access certain teams.
In addition, Intapp Workspaces monitors the number of owners on a team and can notify administrators or even apply emergency ownership temporarily to ensure continued smooth running of the matter collaboration.
Because Intapp Walls automatically syncs your systems’ data with Microsoft Teams and Intapp Workspaces, your firm reduces the risk of noncompliance, along with the need for security maintenance overhead. Your professionals can work and collaborate within Teams more confidently and efficiently than ever before.
If you’d like to see these features in action or have questions not covered in this article, please schedule a demo.
