Working on a new world of legal insight with Peppermint Technology
Pinsent Masons, Peppermint and Microsoft explain why they are joining forces to harness AI and mine vast value from the firm’s vast database of documents.
Imagine unlocking decades of invaluable legal knowledge with just the click of a button.
Law firms typically have a wealth of historical insight in their document management systems (DMSs), which has long lain dormant — their power to drive new levels of performance and productivity for clients potentially wasted.
That’s why Peppermint, in collaboration with Microsoft, is working to help transform the business of turning information into action with Pinsent Masons. Its mission is nothing less than to redefine productivity, data management and compliance across the legal world.
The legal software company is developing a user-friendly, AI-infused enterprise platform — critically, one that lawyers will want to use.
The vision is of a true centre of information that is contextually aware — from which lawyers can extract, analyse and manage data essential for their day-to-day operations — all while safeguarding data security and enforcing regulatory compliance.
The collaboration offers an alternative solution that can coexist with industry-standard DMSs. Leveraging Microsoft SharePoint Embedded, a sophisticated enterprise storage platform, enables Peppermint to design a user experience tailored for lawyers and enriched with innovation. It integrates seamlessly into the firm’s existing Microsoft 365 environment, enhancing the value of prior investments in the software giant’s robust security and compliance features.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) within the Peppermint Connect solution will be able to assist and autonomously identify, classify and securely store documents.
The vision is of a true centre of information that is contextually aware — from which lawyers can extract, analyse and manage data essential for their day-to-day operations
The truly game-changing part then involves extracting and surfacing this information to be accessible by Microsoft Copilot and other business-related processes using extensible plugins — enabling lawyers to draw on the information most relevant to particular tasks and points of their day much more effectively.
Accessing content stored within Microsoft SharePoint Embedded is effectively streamlined through Peppermint Connect. Integrated natively within Microsoft 365 Apps, this serves as the central hub for leveraging the comprehensive value and capabilities of Microsoft 365, which includes advanced security, information barriers, data loss protection and threat protection.
It lives contextually where the individual lawyer is already working, across platforms — web, desktop and mobile — and through apps such as Teams for collaboration.
The keys to smarter content management
Pinsent Masons and Peppermint have a “shared vision of liberating and modernising access to the latent value held within legal content”, says Mike Walker, chief technical officer at Peppermint.
Microsoft’s contribution will be achieved by “harnessing AI and legal lifecycle and matter management tools, all of which are exposed to lawyers through the Peppermint Connect user interface” he adds.
Pinsent Masons currently has over 100 million files sitting in two different places (SharePoint and the DMS).
Tim Dale, director of knowledge at Pinsent Masons, says that centralising content in a single Microsoft environment will enable other Microsoft 365 tools to play their part in making day-to-day knowledge management more efficient.
“Centralisation makes the firm’s whole corpus of knowledge available to new extractive and generative AI to power some seriously transformative productivity gains. With Copilot alongside Peppermint Connect, lawyers will be able to search the entire estate for a single item with natural language search that automatically incorporates synonyms and related terms,” explains Dale.
“Documents or clauses can also easily be compared with others to identify the ‘best in class’ examples to use, while auto application of metadata makes the overall container richer for search purposes — substantially reducing manual document management workload in the process.”
Centralisation makes the firm’s whole corpus of knowledge available to new extractive and genAI to power some seriously transformative productivity gains
“The lawyer is central to the value and adoption of this system,” he says. “Peppermint Connect is the glue that streamlines many of the repetitive tasks lawyers face by providing contextually-aware information where they want it.”
Walker suggests that AI-driven technology can, for example, identify a document drafted for a corporate bank and automatically categorise it as the financial services sector — eliminating a manual classification task for lawyers. The system allows for refined search filters such as industry relevance, document recency and authorship, making it easier to navigate through vast troves of documents.
But the success of this refined search is contingent on the availability of rich metadata. Without it, sifting through such a large volume of documents to find what’s truly valuable remains a significant challenge.
For example, Dale says it can make understanding market norms much easier. A legal professional drafting a particular clause could quickly compare the clause they have against others in recent documents with a similar profile. This could show whether the clause aligns with prevailing market norms and maximises utilisation of existing IP.
Securing the knowledge
Provision in the Microsoft 365 environment also helps firms comply with data protection laws and regulatory requirements by making use of permissions.
“Lawyers can co-author or share with clients or other parties on a need-to-know or time-limited basis, or by applying a password for access,” explains Dale.
This is possible because SharePoint Embedded places information into secured ‘containers’, left within the law firm’s own Microsoft 365 environment, allowing Peppermint to containerise transactional data into storage containers that light up with information Pinsent Masons has entered with ease, adds Walker.
This is aligned with seamless integration to other features already part of Microsoft 365 licenses — such as information barriers, security, audit controls, legal hold, purview records of authority and common Microsoft Admin — unlike other legacy-based solutions.
Speaking up in future
The ambitious productivity push doesn’t stop there. The next goal is to streamline a lawyer’s search experience even further.
The trio envisages a system where you could prompt vocally to retrieve older documents or emails for the same comparative analysis using natural language.
Imagine a lawyer wanting to find a document they’d created some time in the last two years concerning aircraft repossession. Instead of filling out numerous specific criteria, they’d simply state their query using everyday language, as the system can identify synonyms and related terms.
These innovative moves are core foundations being built to help ground the information to feed the LLMs — giving the legal world a significant intelligence and actionability upgrade — and enabling firms serious about efficiency to tap into their hidden depths of knowledge.
