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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Armstrong Watson chooses Repstor’s complete suite of Microsoft 365-based ECM, Teams & client collaboration capabilities as continued lockdown prompts new ways of working

The Repstor for Accounting™ suite is already live after a rapid, pandemic-prompted rollout, giving users access to powerful capabilities for managing Teams, mobile email and documents, and external collaboration via the tools they already use every day

Belfast, February 2^nd, 2021 – Repstor, the Microsoft 365-based information management specialist, has today announced that Armstrong Watson, a top-30 UK business advisory and accounting firm serving the north of England and Scotland, has selected and gone live with Repstor for Accounting™, after Covid-19 lockdowns intensified demand for Teams-based collaboration and secure remote access to client records.

Armstrong Watson, which employs 440 people across 16 offices from the M62 to Glasgow and on both sides of the Pennines, provides services spanning accountancy, cloud accounting, audit, tax, payroll, corporate finance, financial planning, forensic accounting, corporate restructuring and insolvency.

During the pandemic, its clients have needed more tailored support which Armstrong Watson partners and teams have had to provide remotely. When the first pandemic lockdown struck in March 2020, demand for video calls and collaboration via Teams went through the roof.

This caused Armstrong Watson to bring forward plans to migrate to Office 365, a decision which introduced some challenges with, the firm’s existing document management system.

“Accessing some of the new functionality, including co-authoring support, would have meant a significant integration burden,” explains Toby Woodhead, the firm’s Head of Technology.

The Microsoft 365-based Repstor for Accounting™ suite, which includes powerful capabilities for managing Teams, mobile email and document management, as well as third-party collaboration, provides a wealth of rich functionality directly from within familiar Microsoft applications.

“From day one, Repstor has enabled our people to access client records, documents, audit trails and calculations from anywhere, so we’ve been able to keep providing a continuous service to our clients,” Toby says. “What’s more, due to the pandemic, I didn’t have to convince users of the switch. Never before have I witnessed such a desire in a firm to adopt new technology.”

A strategic technology advisor recommended Repstor as a means to enable comprehensive remote working, with full compliance controls over email, document filing and Teams use. “I googled Repstor, made contact the same day and within a week we were talking commercials,” Toby says.

“We did a quick review of other potential solutions, but Repstor offered us everything we needed – including a strategic step change in our ability to do business, which DMS vendors couldn’t match. Crucially too, Repstor was harnessing our investment in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint,” he adds.

Following a rapid and comprehensive proof of concept, Repstor introduced partner Transform Data to help with data migration from the old document management system to SharePoint, the firm’s new default content store.

Ultimately, Repstor for Accounting will serve as a complete client engagement management system. Already, the ability to work seamlessly from home means Armstrong Watson’s professionals can engage with the MDs of busy companies on their personal accounting at 8am, before they themselves start work. “This opens up new business opportunities,” Toby notes.

“I can honestly say we’re seeing seismic ramifications from our decision to transform the way we work,” he enthuses. “When I wrote my board report for the last year I described this as the biggest step for Technology in the firm for 10 years, since we moved our servers into a data centre.

“For users, everything is just seamless: it just works and is there for them in Outlook. They can take advantage of important capabilities like co-authoring, too. Another Repstor benefit is the ability to work on- and offline, so if someone is in a rural area where broadband is weak they can download a document, continue working on it, and then re-synchronise it later when they’re back online.

“From an IT perspective, we’re leaps and bounds ahead with our ambitions for Teams, which will soon become a central hub that we’ll all work from,” Toby continues. “After that we’ll add client access to a SharePoint portal, for secure external collaboration. The sky is the limit for users then: we’ll be able to use all of the exciting new technology Microsoft is giving us, and have more of a ‘project teams’ focus, giving our people a chance to get deeper into our client engagements.”

Armstrong Watson also plans to make use of advanced Microsoft 365 features such as PowerAutomate for automating document approval workflows in SharePoint, and the systemised production of documents from blocks of data, which will enable substantial cost savings and productivity gains.

“Last but not least, standardising on Microsoft 365 and Repstor will make it easy to add all sorts of other products – such as an electronic document signing tool – because so many of these naturally integrate with Microsoft 365, as Repstor does. This will massively reduce the cost of integration.”

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Scheduling Teams file administration: maintaining the authority of the main system of record

Teams is a natural hub for collaborating on client engagements, projects and legal matters. This is fine as long as important dialogues and updated documents are routinely filed back to a central repository providing a ‘single source of truth’. Here’s how to achieve that.

I’ve noted in previous articles about Teams that, if companies can establish reliable integration with their chosen systems of record or document management system, the Microsoft platform becomes a very powerful workspace. It can now be a space where client engagements, projects or matters can be discussed and progressed very efficiently, irrespective of where co-workers are located.

This integration is important to close the content management loop. It helps ensure consistent and compliant filing – so that the latest documents and relevant discussions are easy to find again, and so that there is no confusion over the current status of the client work.

Repstor for Teams™ supports all popular scenarios for professional services content filing, and for core systems integration. If organizations want to default to Microsoft and Teams for all document management (for legal use, for instance), we can support that and keep everything organized, traceable and compliant. But if the priority is to maintain consistent use of an existing system of record, while benefitting from the easy everyday usability of Teams, here’s how we can help maintain information compliance – without this becoming an administrative burden for users.

Flexible control

Rather than discouraging people from storing documents in the Files area of Teams, we make it possible for co-workers to keep documents there while they are working and collaborating in Teams, while making sure that content is saved off to the main system of record automatically. We provide a range of controls so managers can determine whether this happens immediately, every hour, or once a matter or engagement comes to an end. These flexible controls mean that knowledge workers can operate in a way that’s convenient and easy for them, but without creating longer-term information management issues.

Housekeeping

We also provide the ability to schedule the clean-up and deletion of Teams-based content, so that documents and message threads do not linger indefinitely in redundant ‘teams’. Again, this enables greater freedom for colleagues to be productive and efficient in their work, without the worry about information housekeeping when the given client activity has ended.

Synchronization

When new documents are created and added to the core system of record or document management system, Repstor for Teams makes these readily discoverable in Teams. Thanks to the deep integration we provide between Teams and back-office records, we make it easy for authorized members of a current team to search directly for any content linked to a current matter/engagement/project, and bring it through to the current team area for discussion or editing. Importantly, we close the loop here too, ensuring that any updates to those documents that are made in Teams are reflected in the main system of record.

Filing relevant chat threads

In addition to any documents held in the Files area of Teams, we also provide easy controls to enable significant chat threads to be captured and stored to matter or engagement-related records.

Again, these controls can be adapted to suit each organization’s particular needs. Repstor for Teams can extract entire topics that are deemed to be important, or look for threads that have been tagged as something to be saved. This selective conversation capture ensures that peripheral chats with no value are not stored.

Once a topic or thread has been tagged as important and ‘to be saved’, any additions to that conversation will be saved automatically. This is all transparent to participants, so they know a particular conversation thread will be captured and stored.

By providing flexible, automated controls like these, Repstor makes it easy for professional services teams to work in the way that feels the most natural to them, wherever they are, while maintaining information compliance continuity.

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.

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Microsoft Cortex paves the way for AI-enabled knowledge management

If ever there was a reason to swap legacy legal document management systems for mainstream Microsoft 365-based matter management, this is it.

The potential for artificial intelligence, and machine learning in particular, to transform enterprise content management has been clearly identified. And no sector stands to gain more from this capability than the professional services world, which is so closely bound with hefty and complex documentation. So it was amid great anticipation that we welcomed the recent unveiling of Microsoft Cortex.

Project Cortex is a suite of new Microsoft AI tools, designed to analyse content created across the Microsoft 365 platform, and shared across teams and systems – to form an on-demand ‘knowledge network’ across the enterprise which is organised and updated automatically in connection with common topics. (It also offers the facility to automate processes based on content discovered and extracted from incoming documents, with the potential to save busy knowledge workers a great deal of time scouring files for the critical information they contain – something I’ll cover in my next blog.)

AI for all

For the professional services world, and for legal teams in particular, the arrival of Cortex is potentially transformational. Up to now, AI-based tools for legal teams have tended to be expensive, niche products designed for specific tasks such as automated contract assembly or document content analysis. But now that Microsoft is championing AI-based content services, richer and more diverse capabilities will come with reach of entire enterprises, potentially spanning multiple use cases -including all kinds of legal applications. And it’s these legal uses cases that Repstor will be homing in on and making easy and intuitive for busy professionals.

So what can we expect in the way of improved knowledge management?

With Cortex, any client or matter-related content or information created or passing across the Microsoft 365 platform will be able to have AI techniques applied to it – so that it can be identified, categorised and discovered more readily, via smart automation.

This isn’t just about content itself, but about the wider picture – for example identifying the relevant people working on a particular client matter, the experts in a particular field, and/or the key documents linked to a given topic.

Powered by the Cortex AI tools suite, Microsoft 365 will be able to distil themes and key attributes from email, documents and teams activity to determine distinct topics and important materials and information linked to them, drawing all of this together so that it can be found instantly. Better still, teams will be able to guide Cortex in its learning so that it becomes more accurate at determining what’s important, or the topics to which materials and experts are linked.

Exponential efficiency gains

For legal teams under pressure to be more productive and contribute more directly to the business, Microsoft’s new smart knowledge management capabilities will save substantial time spent looking up related email threads; previous matters or contracts; or legal experts involved in similar or adjacent cases.

Although Microsoft may not have specific credentials in legal content management, this is where Repstor comes in – bringing the best of proven, mainstream, Microsoft IT to the intricacies of legal matter management. Put another way, we enable legal teams to benefit from the billions upon billions of dollars that Microsoft has invested in the latest, smartest and most secure content management, collaboration and business productivity software.

Content technology analysts such as Gartner are hailing Microsoft as a visionary leader in the field. It is no coincidence that Microsoft has invested billions and achieved industry leading set of patents on AI. Repstor has fairly exclusive access to ongoing plans for the platform too, as an official Microsoft content services partner. This, coupled with our deep legal sector expertise, positions us perfectly to bring AI to bear where it really matters. So watch this space.

Accounting 2020: accelerated digital disruption gives way to new national growth opportunity

Digital disruption in accounting: it started with cloud-based accounting software; received a boost from government digital tax initiatives; then COVID-19 came along to compound the imperative – for accounting firms to become more digitally advanced in their operations. This, in turn, is going to pave the way for huge, irreversible change for the industry – something firms need to be ready for, while it still presents an opportunity for them to differentiate their services in new ways.

Accountancy Age has been charting the acceleration of digital transformation across the sector since the arrival of COVID-19, noting the growing sense of urgency for firms to update their capabilities.

This is not just because clients expect it, or even that the current climate demands it. The wide-scale acceptance of digital ways of working also presents an opportunity for accounting professionals to think about what they do in new and innovative ways.

A new era for accounting

Post lockdown, accounting firms and their clients have realised that remote collaboration works perfectly well and saves everyone a lot of valuable time. This realisation, coupled with now-widespread familiarity with Zoom and Microsoft Teams, has set new expectations about how accounting work should be managed in future.

For clients, it is a relief not to have to keep track of paperwork as digital records become the norm. When they can submit documents online at their own convenience, knowing the details can be retrieved and reviewed at any point (via a client portal, for instance), there is new efficiency and peace of mind. No one likes meetings, especially if they are paying for the time involved.

For accounting firms, advanced document and process digitisation makes it possible to improve margins, as professionals are able to recoup time previously spent attending client meetings or chasing paperwork.

Moreover – and this is the exciting part – they can start to think about growing the business geographically.

Location no longer matters

In a post-COVID world there is no reason why a small firm in Leeds couldn’t go after business in Hertfordshire. If everything can be done very efficiently at a distance, location ceases to matter.

But this is where firms need to be clever. As physical boundaries dissolve, competition between service providers will soar – and it will fall to each firm to find new ways to differentiate its services. At one end, this is likely to include driving costs down through new process efficiency, enabled via automation and client self-service (eg letting clients upload their own documents or retrieve their own records). At the other, opportunities will be linked to smarter analytics and new value-added services.

It’s why we’re seeing such a surge of interest in Microsoft 365 as a default platform for organising and running accounting operations.

Invest where the innovation is

Microsoft 365’s core functions and means of navigation are already familiar, comfortable and used every day by almost everyone – including clients. So, rather than spend a fortune on special software to support digital reinvention, accounting firms can simply meet clients where they already are.

There’s so much more to Microsoft 365 these days, too – and Microsoft is enhancing and adding to the platform all the time, with the very latest technology. Beyond Outlook, SharePoint and Teams, tools like Cortex, PowerBI and Power Automate make it possible to streamline and optimise workloads. For an accounting team, the ability to rapidly retrieve the details of any clients advised on previous HMRC updates could allow professionals to proactively target these accounts next time there’s an update to tax requirements, for instance.

Repstor can provide direct integration with existing business systems, providing vital links with existing document and information sources, so these are readily discoverable from within Microsoft 365 applications. By helping professional services firm move from costly, bespoke or ‘best-of-breed’ solutions to this powerful, extensible and commonplace platform, we help them take advantage of the billions of R&D dollars MS has invested in it – to transform the way they work, compete and win.

Repstor to launch Repstor for Teams™ at ILTA>ON 2020

As well as providing easily customisable security and information compliance controls, the native Microsoft 365 solution unlocks Teams’ potential as the default central hub for all matter activity

ILTA>ON, August 24-28^th, 2020 – Repstor, the Microsoft 365-based matter management specialist, has chosen ILTA>ON 2020, a major international event for the global legal technology community, for the formal launch of its timely new solution, Repstor for Teams™. This enables legal teams to coordinate and progress all matter management in a secure, ordered and traceable way from within the mainstream collaboration platform.

The rise & rise of Teams

Repstor has created its latest native Microsoft 365-based solution, Repstor for Teams, in response to the sharp rise in Teams adoption seen during the COVID-19 lockdown, as dispersed teams sought more spontaneous ways to stay connected and keep matters moving once outside the office.

Designed specifically for law firms, in-house legal teams and other professional service providers, Repstor for Teams enhances the Teams experience for users, so they can default to the platform as a hub for their everyday matter work. Intensifying pressures on legal operations, including the need to support more dispersed teams and pursue new operating models, have exposed inefficient practices including modes of document sharing and client collaboration as part of ongoing matter management, and now more than ever Teams addresses that gap.

“Teams is being keenly adopted right across the legal sector, to the point that pretty much everyone has it now,” notes Fergus Wilson, Repstor’s CTO. “It’s the natural way to stay connected with peers and clients – but there is so much more to it than its collaboration capabilities. And it’s that potential that our product is designed to unlock for legal teams.”

Where other Teams ‘companion’ products focus predominantly on basic teams creation and lifecycle management, as well as security controls, Repstor for Teams goes further. “Deriving full value from Teams is about so much more than information housekeeping – tracking conversation threads and deleting content when required,” Fergus explains. “Repstor’s expertise with the Microsoft 365 platform allows our integration to go so much further.”

Beyond compliance: creating a single window on all matter activity

As well as allowing organisations or individual departments to tailor their own security settings, teams lifecycle management and information compliance controls, Repstor for Teams provides direct links to firms’ existing systems of record as well as time management and billing systems, providing a single window into all client activity while closing the loop on document and email filing.

“We make it easy to create teams with all the right parameters and controls, the right look and feel for the given purpose, intuitive dashboard navigation, and direct links to core systems – from document management/systems of record, to time and billing systems. This means busy lawyers and administrative assistants can quickly find everything they need via a single viewpoint.”

Repstor for Teams offers substantial efficiency gains for legal operations. When Forrester reviewed Microsoft Teams for its potential in 2019, it noted that many of the savings associated with using Teams were linked to people having everything they needed available in a single space. It identified that information workers could save more than one hour per week by not having to switch between applications. “Access to third-party and line-of-business apps inside Teams from any device benefits all workers, especially remote workers,” Forrester’s report noted. During the COVID-19 lockdown, these findings bore out for all kind of professional services providers.

Poyner Spruill is an early customer of Repstor for Teams. The firm’s CIO, Ellen Kinsinger says, “The great thing about Repstor for Teams is that it takes our use of Teams to the next level – and we can feel relaxed about people using it extensively in their work because Repstor makes it so easy to set up the right controls for each use case. Teams is fast becoming our de facto way of working and, thanks to Repstor’s intuitive controls and navigation, that will have a very positive impact – both on people’s productivity, and on morale.”

Repstor will be demonstrating the new product at this year’s virtual ILTA>ON international legal technology event, which takes place online between August 24-28, 2020.

About Repstor

Repstor is the Microsoft 365-based Matter Management company. We specialize in optimizing Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams productivity and information control for law firms and in-house legal teams.

We enable legal teams to coordinate and progress all matter management in a secure, ordered and traceable way from within Microsoft 365 and Teams. Harnessing the investment already made in these platforms, we offer substantial efficiency gains for law firms and legal operations.

Firms including Adams & Adams, gunnercooke, Boels Zanders Advocaten, and legal teams within major brands such as IATA and National Grid are among the many organisations globally that enthusiastically use our solution, Custodian for Legal™, which is cloud-hosted, affordable and very easy to deploy.

For more information, visit www.repstor.com or find us on Twitter at @Repstor1.

About ILTA>ON

This year’s ILTA>ON, aimed at the global legal technology community and hosted by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), will take place virtually – online. The five-day conference, taking place August 24-28, 2020, will offer comprehensive peer-driven programs, educational content, and face-to-face virtual networking. It will see industry experts and the legal community come together to discover and evolve successful legal operation strategies for today’s transforming legal industry. ILTA is the premier peer networking organization, providing information to members to maximize the value of technology in support of the legal profession.

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The big clear-out: content platform consolidation will be a legacy of COVID-19

As I’ve noted previously, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the urgency around digital transformation. Many professional services firms aren’t simply reviewing their IT now. They are talking purposefully about ripping out the legacy of bespoke and stovepipe content management systems in favour of a simplified, consolidated platform strategy.

No half measures

We hear it in almost every client interaction today – with small legal teams, mid-sized accounting practices and Big-4 consulting firms. All accept that ways of working will never be the same again. Microsoft Teams has become so intrinsic to everyday practice that managers never want to revert to former means of collaboration. If ever there was a time to go ‘all in’ with Microsoft 365, it is now.

One of our newest customers expects to save more than 50 per cent of its IT costs by consolidating all of its activities on MS 365. As well as reducing costs and simplifying its IT estate, bringing all users onto the same platform accessible from anywhere, defaulting to MS 365 will pave the way to all sorts of new state-of-the-art content management capabilities and features as these become available.

The rise & rise of Microsoft 365

The uptick in more widespread use of the Microsoft platform is palpable. By mid-June, MS Teams use was up 894 per cent on mid-February – further boosting take-up of MS 365 which had already recorded 58 million additional seats in the six months to March.

Crucially, Microsoft no longer positions MS 365 as an ‘office suite’, but as a cloud-based platform underpinning an extensive suite of integrated applications – as well as smart business/process analytics, and continuous access to cutting-edge innovation.

All of this has huge appeal in the professional services sector, where we know from direct conversations across the spectrum, from the big 4 right through to medium and smaller professional services firms (and also legal firms) are busy rethinking their operations.

Take Microsoft Cortex, which will pave the way to automated knowledge management and instant information discovery across entire global organisations. For an advisory firm, this could help teams call up examples of relevant previous project delivery, and leverage successful work in future engagements – accelerating outcomes, improving the client experience, and boosting margins.

As more firms consolidate their content management on MS 365, Repstor provides an essential bridge – enabling tight integration and intuitive content management exchange with core business systems.

We can also help distil greater insights about working practices, as organisations explore scope to be more efficient – by being smarter in their resourcing, or by digitising and automating more processes.

Microsoft Teams isn’t just for collaboration: It’s the ideal everyday workspace

Teams ‘companion’ products that focus solely on information compliance are missing a trick. Getting the best from the platform means setting it up in a way that feels natural and helpful to users, so that it becomes a one-stop desktop and dashboard for entire workloads

As I’ve noted in recent blogs, use of Microsoft Teams has proliferated beyond all expectation especially since March. The platform’s ready availability, intuitive ease of use, and inherent compatibility with other everyday Microsoft 365 tools, have made it an instinctive way of bringing together a diverse range of dispersed people to work productively in perfect synchronisation.

To prevent associated information chaos, Repstor and others have been promoting solutions that help bring content management under compliant control. For legal firms and professional services providers, freedom to collaborate is a mixed blessing. Without appropriate levels of security, and without systematic filing and traceability, there is a risk of sensitive content finding its way into the wrong hands, for instance. Critical updates to the status of content, or of client accounts, could be missed, too. Fortunately, with the right solution, these issues are easy to address.

A single point of coordination for all client work

Firms’ optimisation of Teams should not begin and end with compliance, however. Teams is not just a collaboration tool: seeing and treating it as such is to massively underestimate its potential. When Forrester sought to quantify the benefits of Teams, it noted that many of the savings associated with using Teams were linked to people having everything they needed available in a single space – or, more specifically, the reduced need to switch between different applications to look for information needed to complete tasks:

Forrester found that information workers save more than one hour per week by not having to switch between applications. “Access to third-party and line-of-business apps inside Teams from any device benefits all workers, especially remote workers,” it noted.

We go further – so your people don’t have to

Making Teams work harder and deliver more for legal organisations and professional services providers is our priority at Repstor. We tick all of the compliance, security, lifecycle and content management boxes that information managers require too of course – but we go much further.

We strongly believe Teams has the power to transform the way professionals work on client engagements and legal matters, by acting as the coordinating central window to and control panel for all of the work involved. We facilitate this by providing direct integration with existing systems of record, as well as practice management and resource planning systems – plus other time-saving Microsoft 365 tools like Planner.

We also make it easy for organisations or specific departments to customise the way Teams looks and feels – and provide intuitive dashboards that help pinpoint teams quickly by client or activity.

The great thing about Teams is that its use is already almost universal, so convening everyone on the same platform and coordinating the way they work has never been easier, or more affordable.

The challenge now is not to limit what professional service providers and legal firms do with it.

Discover more

We have demostrated the unique capabilities of Repstor for Teams and provided some handy ‘tips from the field’ in our previous practical, bite-sized webinars – to watch these on demand click here