Why law firms are using SharePoint online according to Proventeq
A lawyer can create up to 100,000 pages of information a year. Due to the number of documents legal cases generate, one of the most important aspects of running a successful legal practice is to have a secure and easily accessible content management system.
Additionally, with the remote trend of working in today’s business, it is advisable to modernise your firm so that your lawyers can securely work from anywhere, at any time, and with anyone whilst adhering to the highest security and governance controls.
Legacy ECMs, are deemed to be no longer fit for several purposes and have been proven to slow businesses down in this ever-increasing digital world. SharePoint Online, a cloud-based system with state-of-the-art security allows collaboration between co-workers and increases productivity with metadata tagging.
Here are five reasons SharePoint Online can help your legal firm today.
Internal file organisation
Many legacy ECMs are a nightmare to navigate. Documents are easily lost or difficult to find. Busy legal professionals do not have the time to search through millions of files to find the one that cracks the case.
Collaboration and sharing
The growing complexity of legal work is often cross-practice and multijurisdictional. Meaning lawyers increasingly need to collaborate across expertise, organisational, and location boundaries.
SharePoint Online allows legal professionals to efficiently handle caseloads as lawyers can quickly edit, review, and amend documents on the go. The real-time co-authoring function allows multiple users to collaborate on a single agreement, contract, or other legal documents simultaneously.
Security
There is a need to protect your client’s highly sensitive and confidential information from security threats (both internal and external) but still needs to be easily accessible to the relevant team.
SharePoint Online allows this by enabling easy-to-set permissions for shared documents that can be further supported by enabling Azure Information Protection.
Individual documents are protected, such as contract and business deal information, from being accessed by unauthorised users. Only designated legal practitioners working on relevant elements of the case can open the document. All of this is controlled and managed by a single admin portal for ease of use.
Policy & compliance
We all understand the importance of data privacy. Law Firms have the additional burden of protecting sensitive content, like clients’ data and case matters, as a commitment to the customers they serve. SharePoint Online enables you to manage policy and compliance with a range of tools.
Increase productivity by helping to get work done from anywhere and anytime
And finally, we have already explained how SharePoint Online increases productivity through easy collaboration. But it doesn’t stop there.
Automatic version control and history make previous versions of documents readily available and accessible. Tools like Microsoft Flow and Power Apps can streamline repetitive tasks and business processes, for example, automating document approvals and notifications.
You can create a flow for new documents to be saved in a particular folder on your firm’s SharePoint site, which then triggers an approval process that requires one or more people in the firm to work together on the document.
Conclusion
Want to better serve your fee-paying clients, reduce your case admin, and increase your data compliance? Simply modernising your legacy ECM/DMS and migrating to Microsoft SharePoint Online could be the answer.
Contact us to learn how SharePoint can seamlessly integrate into your practice. Our Microsoft experts will be happy to discuss your unique requirements.
