It’s true that Microsoft has an abundance of capabilities for legal document management—SharePoint Premium offers AI-driven content intelligence, and Microsoft Purview provides data lifecycle management. However, even Microsoft cannot develop capabilities to meet every niche or specialist requirement. This is why there is a thriving global ecosystem of implementation and software development partners specifically catering to the needs of the legal industry. By using a combination of these tools, you’ll be able to form an Avengers-like tech stack for your legal needs. 

This is the fourth article of the five-part SharePoint legal series:

1. SharePoint for Legal Document Management
2. The implications of generative AI in the legal space
3. Advanced Features in SharePoint Premium and Microsoft Purview for Legal Document Management
4. Assemble your Legal Avengers: Microsoft, Atlas, and Colligo for Legal Document Management
5. Why metadata matters for legal document management in SharePoint

When using SharePoint Online for legal document management, it’s important to know that there are now over 1,000 pre-built connectors for Power Automate. For simple integration tasks such as moving documents or data from a separate matter management or eBilling solution, the first step is to look for a Power Automate connector for the relevant applications. If there isn’t a pre-built connector available, you can check if the source system has publicly addressable APIs, which can be used to create a custom connector. 

Despite the power and flexibility of Power Automate, there are situations where a more specialized integration is necessary to meet specific needs and requirements. This is where ISV (Independent Software Vendor) partners play a crucial role. You can visualize this as a spectrum, with basic SharePoint Online at one end, more advanced Microsoft capabilities spread throughout, and sophisticated specialist capabilities provided by ISVs at the other end. 

So, what kind of sophisticated, advanced capabilities might you need? Unlike many other industries, where the term knowledge management (KW) might be considered some fluffy, ill-described nirvana-like state above information management, legal KM actually means something to legal professionals. 

Legal KM is based on the principles of reusing already developed knowledge in the form of legal precedents, model agreements or contracts, and clause libraries of reusable language. It builds on the basic KM precepts of capturing, storing, managing and sharing organizational knowledge. Here are two tools you need for legal KM: 

Atlas, by ClearPeople, is a great example of a product built on top of the Microsoft 365 suite to enhance its capabilities. It provides more advanced tools that can provide value in very specific and specialist scenarios with more sophisticated requirements or use cases. 

Atlas is an intelligent knowledge platform that offers the necessary capabilities to extend and enhance a Microsoft 365-based intranet. It provides knowledge management, collaboration, governance, and AI, all in a powerful and flexible all-in-one platform. 

The Atlas features include: 

• AI assistant: A smart chatbot interface that employees can use to obtain immediate and authoritative answers to critical questions from content within Microsoft 365 and other enterprise systems, directly from SharePoint, Teams or through the Atlas AI interface. 

• Add it: Any employee with appropriate permissions can easily contribute to the organization’s collective knowledge using an intuitive step-by-step wizard, pre-configured content types and automatic tagging, available as a Teams app.  

• In focus: A suite of web parts that work together to bring the next generation of search experiences. In focus allows you to deliver content from multiple sources in a single pane view with multiple display modes. 

• Automated classification: Uses Atlas templates to automatically tag documents when they are uploaded, simplifying the organization of information and making it effortless to access for the right people at the right time. 

This just scratches the surface of Atlas’s capabilities. Learn more about the benefits of this tool for law firms and corporate legal departments (CLDs). 

Another area where Microsoft 365’s out-of-the-box capabilities might not meet the needs of legal professionals is email management. Even where firms and CLDs have successfully moved some collaboration into MS Teams, email remains a standard tool for legal professionals, and the volume of email can be enormous. 

Colligo’s email manager for M365 is the partner who rides to the rescue in this case. Colligo provides capabilities not just to easily file emails into SharePoint (e.g., put the correspondence with the rest of the matter files) but to automate the process too: 

• File to SharePoint: Easily file emails and attachments from Outlook to SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive to effectively manage your emails. 

• Automated bulk filing: Easily migrate, copy or move emails and attachments or folders and sub-folders from Outlook to SharePoint in bulk. 

• Auto-apply labels: Automatically extract metadata properties of emails and attachments or manually capture custom fields using Colligo Intelligence (AI). 

• Reduce context switching: Stay in your office apps, search for email from across Microsoft 365, browse and view content in SharePoint from Outlook 

Interested in a deeper dive into all of Colligo’s features and functions? Learn more here.  

If you’re unsure which solutions will best suit your business needs, refer back to the continuum of requirements. If you are a CLD currently using file shares, a move to SharePoint Online as a document management system (DMS) will bring great value and efficiency. If you are also using Outlook as a DMS, then add Colligo to the mix.  

If you are a mid-sized corporate legal department or a small to medium law firm that already has Microsoft 365 licenses and your employees are used to working with those tools, then adding capabilities like Purview for records management and eDiscovery and SharePoint Premium for AI document processing can take your legal process automation to the next level. Colligo can also benefit large, medium and small CLDs by providing a more tailored legal experience (more like a Document Management System) on top of SharePoint while still working with and embracing Purview and records management policies. 

If you are a mid-size to large firm or CLD and have sophisticated legal KM requirements, ClearPeople Atlas adds advanced features to gain additional value from not only the information in your Microsoft 365 tenant but also from other systems and repositories. 

Here is a different way to visualize the continuum of requirements and determine where your organization falls on the graph: 

You no longer need to be stuck with outdated legal knowledge management processes. With Microsoft Purview, SharePoint Premium, Atlas by ClearPeople, and Colligo, manual and inefficient processes are no longer a problem. These tools assemble to form the Avengers team for your legal document management needs. Get started with a free consultation from our expert team, who can make this happen for your organization.