Ultimate guide to Intapp workspaces: law firm collaboration software for Microsoft Teams
Smart collaboration is the key to higher law firm profits, greater client loyalty, and stronger talent attraction and retention.
Your law firm can achieve smart collaboration with Intapp Workspaces, a cloud-based collaboration environment that leverages your existing Microsoft 365 investment to help your legal professionals easily collaborate internally or externally.
Unlike generic solutions for email, document management, file sharing, and chat, Intapp Workspaces is tailored to the unique workflows, regulatory requirements, and user experience requirements of law firms. For example, Intapp Workspaces optimizes the interface of Microsoft Teams with templates specific to practice areas, as well as integrations to other firm systems that allow your lawyers to see all information relating to a matter via a single pane of glass.
What other advantages does Intapp Workspaces provide? This article examines Intapp Workspaces’ many features and how they power your law firm’s success.
Enable a modern way of working
The Intapp Workspaces dashboard creates a single, well-organized window in which your lawyers can access all the information and files they need for working on matters. For example, the content connector tab within Intapp Workspaces integrates with commonly used legacy document management systems (DMS), such as iManage and NetDocuments, allowing users to access and manage their content from a single location.
As a result, your lawyers can check out a document from the DMS, co-author it with other lawyers within Intapp Workspaces, and check the document back into the DMS. Built-in permissions that your firm sets up ensure that documents can’t be shared in ways they shouldn’t once they’ve been checked out. Your lawyers can also publish documents back into iManage or NetDocuments as a major or minor version.
Practice-area-specific tabs and channels within the Intapp Workspaces dashboard provide additional resources your lawyers might need. For example, if they need to conduct legal research on Westlaw, they can click on the Westlaw tab and stay within Intapp Workspaces. Or, if they need a reminder of your firm’s process for handling a particular type of matter, such as wage and hour audits, they can find a guidance document within the channel for that matter type.
In addition, Intapp Workspaces makes it possible for lawyers to access and view Microsoft Power BI reports directly within the Microsoft Teams platform, so they can easily share reports with other team members and collaborate on data analysis in real time. In contrast, with native-only Microsoft Teams, adding a Microsoft Power BI report to Microsoft Teams is a complicated and technical task.
Thanks to the thoroughness and organization of the Intapp Workspaces dashboard, your lawyers enjoy a more pleasant way of working, freed from having to jump between different windows and programs.
Enhance your legal client service capabilities and exceed client expectations
As the legal industry continues to evolve, so too do the demands of clients. Clients want an efficient, modern way to share information and receive updates on a matter. Instead of communicating with clients via endless email chains, your law firm can chat with them and securely share files of any size through the Intapp Client Collaboration product, as well as revoke permissions when access to the files is no longer needed. Clients can even co-author (and simultaneously work on) documents with your lawyers.
Chatting within a particular workspace is also more effective than communicating via email because a workspace chat segregates relevant conversations within that workspace instead of in your inbox, where multiple matters and discussions live. In addition, it’s easier to search within a single chat discussion than through an email account teeming with thousands of disparate messages.
Likewise, when you need to update clients, you can find all information relating to a matter within the single, intuitive interface that Intapp Workspaces provides — instead of having to hunt for matter information across programs. Intapp Workspaces makes this possible because it integrates with and surfaces information from all your other solutions, such as your legacy DMS and intake systems.
Having all matter information in one place also benefits your clients because your lawyers can work more efficiently and with a reduced risk of missing important documents or information.
Empower IT teams with new tools
Your IT team will appreciate that Intapp Workspaces prevents Microsoft Teams sprawl through auto-archiving of inactive teams and concluded matters. Without these controls, lawyers often create teams at will and without oversight, resulting in random and even duplicative teams.
In contrast, with Intapp Workspaces, you can securely provision a workspace templated to a particular matter type; workspace permissions are linked to your intake system and enhanced by your walls system so that you cannot add a lawyer in your firm that is working on a conflicting matter.
The IT team also gains consistent application of access controls and audit trails for sensitive information.
Improve processes for managing matters
Intapp Workspaces enables your law firm to simplify your processes for managing matters. For example, by adding Intapp Walls to Intapp Workspaces, you can automatically enforce ethical walls across your firm.
Likewise, by adding Intapp Intake, you can ensure that information gathered during client intake is shared with other integrated systems. Through the integration of Intake with Workspaces, the creation of collaboration spaces becomes a seamless process, eliminating manual intervention and inconsistencies in configuration.
Standardize your matter handling processes to increase efficiency and profitability
In addition to the efficiency your professionals gain from working within a single pane of glass, you can standardize matter tasks with Intapp Workspaces and Microsoft Planner. For example, for all due diligence investigations, you could create standardized tasks. Matter-based templates for teams creation also help your lawyers quickly start on new work.
Your law firm also gains improved knowledge management with the ability to automatically add knowledge bases to a team in the form of content from Microsoft Viva Topics.
Enhance practice-based collaboration and consistency
Junior attorneys are ready and eager to learn, but they need standardized access to precedent documents, practice area knowledge resources, and senior attorneys via both chat and document co-authoring.
With Intapp Workspaces, your junior attorneys can check out precedent documents from your firm’s document management system (DMS), view practice area knowledge resources in Microsoft Viva Topics, and chat and co-author documents with senior attorneys — all within a single environment.
Intapp Workspaces also enables alignment in each practice area through practice-area–specific knowledge kits that contain up-to-date information, best practices information, and other matter-specific resources captured in tabs and channels within a team. Standardized workflows, planner tasks, and document templates by practice area further contribute to consistency and efficiency.
Test-drive Intapp Workspaces for your law firm
When you choose Intapp Workspaces, your law firm retains all the benefits of its investment in Microsoft because Intapp solutions are built on top of Microsoft 365 and incorporate all its benefits and features.
You can see for yourself how Intapp Workspaces optimizes Microsoft Teams for law firms by scheduling a personalized Workspaces demo.
