Accelerating digital transformation with Microsoft 365 post-COVID: what next?

A practical guide for professional services firms looking to consolidate their content access and collaboration capabilities to support more diverse and dynamic working models.

The COVID-19 lockdown has been a tough test of professional services firms’ agility. Whether dispersed teams have been able to quickly access the right content, exchange the latest information with colleagues and clients, and keep consistent and compliant records that can be traced back after the event, depends a great deal on their IT setup.

Many firms immediately ran into problems.

Inevitably this has intensified the urgency around digital transformation – particularly to fill gaps in provision for remote working and dynamic collaboration. It is no coincidence that professional services organisations, small and large, have become bolder in their ambitions – and are now looking purposefully at ripping out bespoke content management systems in favour of a simplified, consolidated, cloud-based platform strategy.

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The digital transformation imperative for corporate legal operations

A practical guide to delivering measurable progress.

Up until very recently corporate legal departments have prided themselves on maintaining the status quo: preserving traditional ways of working and assigning continued value to the informality of adhoc advice; of providing a personalised service to the business which isn’t always logged and formally accounted for.

In 2020, many of these old methods of managing matters were challenged, redoubling the case for digital process transformation in line with other functions across the enterprise. The practical challenges of closing offices and letting professionals take their work home have prompted legal operations to review long-standing process pain points – most notably linked to matter intake and triage; filing of matter-related content and correspondence; and matter analytics and reporting.

Click the link below to access our E-Book on how Repstor can help legal operations deliver process modernisation without over-extending their budgets or disrupting the way lawyers instinctively want to work.

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Major US law firm Nelson Mullins deploys Repstor ‘easy button’ to deliver matter centricity, privacy control & governance as Teams becomes the firm’s default workspace

The American Law 100 firm, which recently deployed Microsoft 365, sees Teams as the key to coordinating matter management, knowledge sharing and client collaboration in one place – with full privacy and information compliance control delivered by Repstor for Teams

Belfast, April 9^th, 2021 – Repstor, the Microsoft 365-based information management specialist, has announced that prominent US law firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP has selected Repstor for Teams to support its transition to Microsoft Teams as its primary workspace for attorneys and paralegals. Repstor will provide the client matter-centric management for content, as well as privacy and information compliance controls, that will enable the firm to exploit Teams to its full potential.

Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP (better known as Nelson Mullins), headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina, is one of the largest law firms in the US with 26 offices across the country, from Boston and New York to Miami and Atlanta. It provides advice and counsel to private individuals and large businesses, across a broad range of practice areas. In 2020, American Lawyer ranked Nelson Mullins as the 68th largest law firm in the US based on gross revenue.

The firm’s IT team strives to stay 6-12 months ahead of the needs of its users, and had already identified the transformative potential of Microsoft Teams before the pandemic struck. But it had come up against a problem: Teams’ lack of inherent support for matter-centric ways of working and organising content. When the impact of COVID-19 triggered new demand for people to work from home, activating the transition to Teams became more urgent.

“We had been a Skype environment previously, and wanted to move to Teams for all aspects of communication anyway having rolled out Microsoft 365 across the firm. But the difficulty was that Teams doesn’t have matter-centricity built in,” explains David Worth, Nelson Mullins’ CIO. “To get buy-in from our attorneys and prevent chaos as they tried to organise and find the right Teams for collaboration by client or matter, we needed a more intuitive and controlled user experience.”

A trusted legal industry-focused management consulting firm which had been providing consultancy to Nelson Mullins, suggested Repstor for Teams. The software, which runs natively in Microsoft 365, provides optimized matter-centric capabilities and controls for Teams, in a familiar user experience.

“As well as offering all the controls and functionality we needed as a law firm, and that user-friendly experience to keep our professionals happy, Repstor brought that depth of experience of working with law firms, that understanding of our needs, and that ability to talk our language,” David notes.

“Importantly, Repstor also readily integrates with NetDocs and other DMSs, with Aderant, our practice management system and Intapp, our ethical walls solution. In other words, they were going to be able to cater for everything we needed.”

Repstor’s content management, governance and privacy controls will be important as Nelson Mullins pursues its wider goals – to make Teams the place where client matter management and file-sharing happens, giving professionals a single window on their work and reducing email reliance.

“Although the initial motivation for moving to Teams is for communications – chat, conference-calling, and screen-sharing – we soon realised the scope to do so much more with it, and Repstor will help us realise that,” David says. “We’re an Outlook shop and traditionally attorneys’ work is dominated by email, but Teams is shifting that paradigm.

“I also see Teams become a quasi-replacement for intranets, supported by Repstor technology. With direct integration with our DMS, and even our financial system, our people will be able to ‘live’ in Teams and do everything from there. What’s great is that we have the right set-up with Repstor and the right advisors around us to work out how to make that look and feel.”

Once fully implemented, Repstor for Teams will be used by 1,600 professionals across Nelson Mullins’ national operations. “People are beating down my door to get access to this, and that demand is ubiquitous from across the firm – something I haven’t witnessed before in my 30-year tenure,” David notes. “Rolling out Teams, by practice area, will be our biggest project for this year.

“This is a chance to transform knowledge sharing across our 26 offices. When this is done our professionals will have one place to share knowledge and experiences, and will be able to find and consume what they need when they need to. I see Teams, optimized by Repstor, as the first real collaboration platform for law firms. It will be attorneys’ first real opportunity to collaborate with clients too, without the need to build an extranet which would be a lot of work. It will make them more nimble, able to address clients’ needs more swiftly.

“Repstor is our ‘easy’ button,” David concludes. “As CIO, I don’t have to worry about figuring out how to manage the archiving or the compliance, as Repstor takes all of that pain away. Repstor are so aligned with us, it’s fantastic. They understand our goals and are providing excellent guidance. Taking this forward is proving a very enjoyable experience.

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The explosive rise of Microsoft 365 in mid-tier law firms: a panel discussion

In February 2021, senior directors of two mid-sized UK law firms – Brachers and Conexus Law – came together with legal market advisor Derek Southall and Sheila Gormley, VP of Legal Solutions at Repstor, for a virtual discussion on the significant and growing impact of Microsoft 365 for transforming the way legal teams operate.

As well as debating Microsoft’s substantial footprint in the sector, the panel gave their perspectives on rising trends among law firms including IT consolidation, dispersed operating models, and the appetite to increase knowledge re-use, operational intelligence and process automation.

Adams & Adams bases a more agile future on Repstor for Legal and Cloud Essentials

South African law firm Adams & Adams bases a more agile future on Repstor for Legal and Cloud Essentials

Find out how Adams & Adams, a leading South African law firm that employs around 600 people across four office locations, worked with Cloud Essentials and Repstor to produce a solution for their legal document and matter management.

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A Repstor and SYKE Success Story

Microsoft, Repstor & SYKE give Pizza Hut’s corporate legal team new control over matter intake, management & reporting, using its existing Microsoft 365 applications.

Pizza Hut, headquartered in Texas and owned by Yum! Brands, is an American restaurant chain and international franchise business. With over 18,000 restaurants worldwide, it is one of the largest restaurant companies in the world. In the UK, where it has been operating for almost half a century, Pizza Hut has over 200 branches. It also provides takeaway delivery services.

Find out how Repstor and SYKE worked with Pizza Hut’s in-house legal function to be seen as a trusted partner to the business in the case study below.

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Repstor Gears up for Continued Fast Growth in Legal & Professional Services Sectors with Series of New Appointments in the UK & US

Belfast, UK – January 26^th, 2021 – Repstor, the Microsoft 365-based information and matter management specialist preferred by professional services firms globally, has kick-started 2021 with an expanded team, reflecting the company’s confidence in another strong year ahead.

Repstor, which recently made the Deloitte Top 50 Rapid Growth Tech Company list for the fourth year running, has appointed seven new consultants to the team to address the soaring interest in its software among legal and professional services firms on both sides of the Atlantic.

Alison Thorpe has joined as Sales Manager for Repstor’s UK Legal operation, and will spearhead new business development team in this important and fast-growing market for Repstor. Alison joins the company from Eclipse Legal Systems, where she was a Sales Consultant, with other career highlights including the Regional Sales Manager role at Prosperoware.

New products consultants Eve Boardman and Chris Colahan strengthen Repstor’s professional services-focused team in the UK.

Colin Truesdale, whose impressive career includes more than 12 years in Product Marketing and Managing Consultant roles at Kainos, and four years as Training Manager at Meridio, has joined as Head of Pre-Sales. Colin will be responsible for actively driving and managing the pre-sales process within customer opportunities in Legal and Professional Services.

Based in England, Juelma Isabel Nunes joins as an Inside Sales Executive, to support business expansion in the UK.

In the US, a strong and fast-growing market for Repstor’s legal and professional services solutions business, Repstor new appointments include Brad Teed, an experienced solutions architect, product manager and former CTO and Abby Moore, a skilled project manager, to drive business expansion State-side from their base in Texas.

Commenting on all of the new appointments, Alan McMillen, Repstor’s CEO, says, “On behalf of all at Repstor, I warmly welcome these impressive individuals to the company, and look forward to the additional sales growth and customer success they will help to drive in 2021, both in the UK and internationally.”

After a busy and successful year for the company in 2020 despite the difficult climate, Repstor continues to enjoy strong and growing demand for its Microsoft 365-based information management solutions. These help knowledge workers, especially in the professional services sectors, to streamline content and information management from within familiar existing applications including Outlook and Teams.

“We’ve seen all kinds of professional services teams seek to consolidate and digitally simplify the way they manage their projects and caseloads, as the pandemic has deepened and caused operational chaos for firms,” Fergus Wilson, Repstor’s CTO, notes.

“Teams of professionals already loved what we do, but continued lockdowns and remote working have brought forward transformation plans. Specifically, the pandemic has prompted consolidation of information management platforms, and rising interest in secure hosting in the cloud. We’re helping them to standardise more of what they do via the investments they’ve already made in Microsoft 365.”

As well as the recent Deloitte accolade, Repstor has also been named in Gartner’s recent Market Guide for Corporate Legal Matter Management, which recognises companies that have achieved visibility and traction in this sector.

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Why it’s time to digitally transform matter intake

In a recent webinar, the General Counsel of a major UK bank perfectly captured the current mood among his peer group: he had no intention of resuming his two-hour commute to the centre of London, he said, after months of working from home. He is far from alone, and this has ramifications for the way corporate legal teams operate – redoubling the business case for process modernisation, to bring the function more in line with how other departments such as IT, facilities management, and HR operate.

Take the age-old issue of matter intake. For the longest time, the business and the corporate legal function have long enjoyed the informality of a quiet word in the right ear, a nod that some new advice is needed. This ad-hoc way of working has been convenient for business users, able to tap directly into the expertise of their favourite lawyer, while legal professionals have enjoyed their knowledge being sought out; that sense of providing personalised value.

But maintaining these casual, ad-hoc interactions is more cumbersome when people are working from home. There is a further factor at play now, too. Most industry sectors have been hit hard economically by the events of the last six months, putting the pressure on managers to rein in costs and drive new efficiency into everything they do.

For in-house legal teams, which need to be able to demonstrate the value they provide in facts and figures, this leaves no choice but to revisit process digitalisation. If ever professionals needed to be able to deliver more with less – and be discerning and efficient about how work is allocated and resourced, as well as fastidious in measuring progress and productivity – it is now.

Making Microsoft 365 the means of change

Matter intake – the point at which new work comes in – is an obvious place to start with process digitalisation, offering quick wins. Studies suggest that as much as 20 per cent of a corporate legal team’s time is spent on the admin surrounding intake, triage and allocation of new legal instructions from the business – clarifying what’s required and confirming verbal instructions – where there is no standardised process in place. (That’s not including the time spent delivering frequent ad-hoc matter updates expected by the business.)

It is no coincidence that Microsoft 365, the mainstream cloud-based productivity and collaboration platform, has risen to new prominence for legal operations over recent months. That’s as teams have realised just how well it lends itself to streamlined, trackable matter lifecycle management across any combination of locations – starting with matter intake.

Capturing the full requirements needed to process routine legal requests (straightforward contract work, NDAs and simple advisory requirements, for instance), and bringing this activity more in line with administrative processes elsewhere in the business, is fairly easy to achieve. Using structured self-service digital forms, for instance, can prompt the business for the information they need to provide up front – saving on legal professionals’ valuable time that would otherwise be spent capturing any missing details.

Recording the value of legal services

Digitalising matter intake doesn’t need to take away from personal relationships that have been built up with the business, of course. And it may be that this self-service process is reserved for only certain kinds of engagement. But note that one of the big benefits of making things more official from the outset is that each interaction between the business and the legal department is recorded. This makes it easier to account for those lost days spent on ‘5-minute jobs’, and demonstrate the true value the legal department provides to the business.

This is exactly the kind of scenario we can help with, building on organisations’ existing investments in Microsoft 365 applications – to formalise matter intake processes, and sharpen matter lifecycle management, transforming business engagement and document and email management, while also delivering powerful matter analytics.

We’ve produced a rather helpful eBook on it all too which you can download here

Leigh Smith – Repstor

Accelerating digital transformation with Microsoft 365

A practical guide for law firms.

A handy walk-through for law firms looking to consolidate their document, email management and collaboration strategy to support multiple use cases and more flexible working.

Want to see what Repstor could do for you? Fill in the form below now:

The digital transformation imperative for corporate legal operations

A practical guide to delivering measurable progress.