Microsoft Copilot and AI for legal CRM – find out more with HSO
Many people will be becoming familiar with, and using, Microsoft Copilot, most likely in Microsoft Outlook and the Microsoft Bing search engine.
I had an early and stunning Outlook Copilot experience – Copilot gave me a summary of an email trail from a colleague in Germany. A great timesaver for the very lengthy email trail – but I thought I should skim through the emails anyway. They were all in German, and Copilot had given me a translated summary. WOW.
And now, I find Bing with Copilot indispensable for any question I have, whether it’s drafting an RFP response, getting recipes for a set of ingredients, getting a nice concise article to a pointless question about local government in medieval England, or researching this article, although not using Copilot to write it!
Mircosoft Copilot AI in Dynamics CRM
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, which underpins our legal360 CRM solution, Microsoft is continuously adding and tweaking Copilot functions. It’s enhancing productivity as I can get answers to questions faster, with insights and summaries on clients and opportunities, along with summaries of colleagues’ interactions with clients – so I’m kept in the loop.
Whilst Microsoft and others have numerous ‘jargon’ explanations, I thought I’d try and explain these current Copilot functions in Dynamics CRM, and how HSO is exploiting Copilot, from a user perspective:
Business Development, Opportunity Records
Opportunity Summaries was one of the first features released and the most widely used. When an Opportunity record is opened Copilot immediately gives a written summary using data from key fields like Estimated Revenue, Closing Date, Client Size, Primary Contact and Stakeholder. These are the fields we use at HSO, but any fields, standard or custom, can be added to the Copilot summary, although these must be applied globally by an administrator, rather than selected by end-users.
Chat Q&A
General questions on CRM data can be asked from the Copilot panel using natural language, with the ability to also select the record you want to add into the question. e.g. “Give a List of all the opportunities owned by David Smith”, or “List all accounts in industry sector of Professional Services”. (Copilot is obviously trained on keywords so probably doesn’t account for ‘Give a’ but will understand the name of the field and the field value.)
Alternatively, a specific record can be chosen, like an account or contact, for a summary. Again, the fields used by Copilot for each entity/record type, can be selected and applied globally by the administrator.
Recent Record Changes
Copilot can help you catch up on any updates to your account, lead, or opportunity records making it easier to keep in control of a large number of opportunities, particularly if you’re a manager of a team. The list of changes is taken from the Dynamics 365 Audit History for field changes made in the last seven days, or since you last signed in. (It is of course limited to those records for which you have read access rights.)
You ask a simple question, “what’s changed for record type, e.g. Opportunities” and Copilot displays the list of the records that have changes. From there you select the record of interest to see the changed fields. You can also call up the specific record of interest directly.
Fast Q&A
Microsoft has configured a set of pre-defined Copilot questions and tasks in Dynamics 365. These are selected from the set of ‘dropdowns’ shown below; Get Info, Ask Question, Stay Ahead, although these groupings of the questions do seem a little arbitrary.
Ask Questions
Includes complex pre-defined calculations such as, for Opportunities – ‘Give the average sales value and cycle time’. Ask Questions also provides a set of queries for changes for different types of records.
Get Info
Can search through SharePoint and other documents, based on a keyword, to compile a summary. The summary provides the document references with hotlinks and saves the need to switch between applications. Get Info also includes a Bing search with Copilot to provide a news summary on the actual organisation related to the account record.
Stay ahead
Helps with preparation for meetings and identifies which of your emails need a follow-up.
Timeline Activities Summaries
The ability to sync emails and meetings from Outlook to Dynamics CRM is a long-standing feature and vital for relationship understanding – particularly for planning client meetings and avoiding conflicts and embarrassing gaps in knowledge – key for legal firms.
These Outlook activities are displayed in the respective CRM record’s timeline panel in date order. ‘Copilot for Timeline Highlights’ now provides a very quick and easy-to-read summary of the most recent activities without having to scroll down the timeline and open and read each activity record.
Phone Conversation Analysis
Whilst not branded Copilot, Dynamics 365 provides powerful AI functions for analysing and reporting on phone calls made through the CRM automated dialling. As well as generating a transcript, it identifies keywords mentioned, like dates, places, products, currency values and phrases.
It also provides sentiment analysis of the conversation, marking it out on the call timeline, helping legal professionals get a faster and better understanding of the client need.
Conversation Intelligence
Although analysis of fee-earner/client phone conversations is unlikely to be a requirement for most commercial law firms, Copilot for Sales ‘Conversation Intelligence’ is yet another example of the stream of new and very powerful AI functions being delivered by Microsoft.
Conversation Intelligence (one of several Copilot functions recently released as ‘Public Preview’), uses PowerBI to deliver an advanced sales management dashboard to help managers improve seller performance and increase productivity.
Again, not a direct application for large law BD, but could be a very useful function in volume consumer legal practice like PI (personal injury) for example.
Conversation Intelligence monitors both what the user and the contact is saying. It then provides Customer Insights, tracking what the customer or potential client says for trending of brand/product mentions and overall customer sentiment of the call. It likewise provides analysis of the user’s call performance like talk/listen ratio and keywords used to help with coaching and improvement.
HSO legal360 and AI
As a Microsoft Inner Circle partner for many years, HSO has been working closely with Microsoft throughout its evolution of AI components, building them into law firm applications. We collaborated with Microsoft on the early releases of Azure Cognitive Services, a set of prebuilt AI processing capabilities that can be built into third party applications like legal360, for which we have two strong ‘products’.
legal360 AI Company News provides a daily search and distillation of web-based news articles. The function runs automated web searches, and, for each article found, breaks out the key information – companies, people, cities, along with a summary of the article. It complements the Copilot Company News with the added benefit that end-users can create their own simple keywords searches, like ‘Barclays, Brexit’ or ‘HSBC, Hong Kong, or Independence’’.
legal360 AI Client Listening allows firms to process a high volume of audio client interviews, breaking out sentiment analysis, keywords and themes discussed and providing a summary. This allows firms to very quickly process numerous client interviews and quickly gain insight into those clients and identify trends within client organisations, practices and sectors. Our pilot firm was conducting several thousand interviews a year, which were manually transcribed and then had to be read and interpreted – a very painstaking process, and one where it is challenging to acquire any strategic insight.
Content360, built using Copilot allows a firm to target searches at particular web site information sources and, from the content, to compile individual client-specific reports based on criteria defined for the client. Whilst not an integral part of legal360 it is highly complementary as it shares the same look and feel of Dynamics CRM and can deliver the PDF reports to the clients held in CRM.
…and finally, Teams
It’s not Dynamics CRM, legal CRM software or legal360 but a terrific example of how Microsoft Copilot is making a big difference to working life. Writing this blog, I missed the first 1h 50m of a strategy meeting. I managed to join and called up the Teams Meeting Recap. It gave me a short summary of all the themes discussed and by who, with links to the relevant discussion points and suggested action items. This functionality allowed me to swiftly grasp the essentials of nearly two hours of meeting details in mere minutes!
Learn more about how you can enable CoPilot and AI with your teams at Enable Copilot and AI | HSO
