The first article of this SharePoint for legal document management series focused on the basics, including why document management is a key capability for law firms and corporate legal departments (CLDs) and how SharePoint Online can be used for document management in a legal context. 

Check out 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

This third article in the series builds on those topics by examining some of the more advanced document management features provided by additional Microsoft products, specifically SharePoint Premium and Microsoft Purview. These products bring many additional features and functionalities directly applicable to legal document management use cases. This will not be an exhaustive resource, as there is an abundance of information to cover, but it will be a helpful primer.  

Here’s an introduction to these two products and what they bring to the party: 

Both SharePoint Premium and Microsoft Purview are additional licenses that build on the base document management foundational capabilities provided by SharePoint Online to provide additional advanced document management features. 

As you can see from the diagram above, SharePoint Premium is more of a brand for a whole product line, and it builds on what was previously referred to as Content Intelligence provided by Microsoft Syntex into Content AI. Content AI is defined as “experiences and processes that use artificial intelligence to automatically extract and create metadata from content within documents.” 

Microsoft split the capabilities of Content AI into three main categories: Content Experiences, Content Processes and Content Governance. 

The use of metadata is key to driving legal processes and providing intuitive user experiences. While the more metadata, the better (e.g., matter number, case number, docket number, deposition number, client name, practice area, matter type), getting lawyers, paralegals and legal clerks to add it all manually is simply not going to work.   

SharePoint Premium brings built-in Machine Learning models that power automated Image tagging and Taxonomy tagging features that can be used to automatically create metadata. The ability to use out-of-the-box Machine Learning models to identify and classify documents as receipts, invoices and contracts can take document management to the next level in many scenarios, including the automated review of incoming third-party paper for contracts and other agreements.  

If the out-of-the-box models do not currently cover specific needs, there are three different types of custom Machine Learning model creation processes for structured, semi-structured and unstructured documents. These processes enable you to build your own models to classify and process any kind of document, extract all kinds of useful information and append it as metadata, which can then drive business processes, be used for analytics, etc. 

A new SharePoint Premium capability that is currently in preview is the Agreements Solution. This uses AI and content management capabilities to automate agreement creation and management for agreements ranging from NDAs to purchase agreements and complex contracts. This capability will be delivered by an Agreements App in MS Teams, and it will provide features to: 

• Define templates: Create templates in Word, insert custom fields and snippets from a library, configure reviewers and approvers, and publish templates for reuse. 

• Generate agreements: Self-service creation of agreements from the templates, edit and send out for review and approval, and track the status and history of each in-flight agreement. 

• Review and negotiate: Use AI-driven deviation analysis to compare agreements with templates and flag identified risks or changes. Collaborate with internal and external parties, accept or suggest changes, and resolve issues. 

• Sign and store: Send e-signature requests from Word or Teams, sign agreements with built-in Microsoft eSignature or third-party providers, and store signed agreements in SharePoint. 

• Report and analyze: Unlock data to create insights. Access reports and dashboards to monitor your agreements’ performance and compliance and use AI to extract metadata and insights from them. 

This is a great example of Microsoft building on the initial Content Assembly capabilities of the initial release of SharePoint Premium and quickly evolving it into a tool that will have great utility in a legal document management scenario.  

Microsoft Purview is also more of a product family or product line than a single piece of software or a single service you subscribe to, and of course, some of those titles used to describe the capabilities seem to change every now and then. With respect to document management, Microsoft states that Purview provides “advanced data governance and auditing features to adhere documents to regulatory and security standards”. 

Microsoft Purview Capabilities – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/purview 

Purview Data Classification provides several ways to examine and classify your documents’ content. Microsoft provides hundreds of pre-built Sensitive Information Types (SITs), which are pattern recognition-based classifiers that can identify common data types like credit card numbers, social security numbers, and passport numbers. If there is no existing SIT that will find the data you are interested in, there are Trainable Classifiers that you can “teach” to recognize the patterns you are looking for. Both data classification methods are used with a flexible and powerful feature called Sensitivity Labels. 

Think of Sensitivity Labels as the digital equivalent of taking a big rubber stamp and red ink and stamping “Top Secret” or “Legal Privileged Information” on every document. Not only do Sensitivity Labels mark digital (and hard copy) documents as containing sensitive information of various types, but they can also drive security actions like encryption and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, preventing sharing or constraining the distribution of documents to specific groups or teams.  Sensitivity Labels are a powerful tool that adds a lot of nuances to how documents can be managed from a security and privacy perspective. 

Regarding data governance, Purview provides solutions that help you manage your data across your ecosystem, whether it encompasses on-premises, SaaS (software as a service), or multi-cloud. These tools include: 

• Data catalog: Allows you to find the data you’re looking for. It presents only results you have permission to view in response to your search. 

• Data estate insights: Highlights governance gaps in the organization’s data estate and presents actionable steps for stakeholders to take, 

• Data map: Creates a map of your entire data estate that includes data classification. 

• Data policy: Helps you manage access to different data systems across your data estate. 

• Data sharing: Allows you to share data from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 and Azure Storage accounts to internal or external stakeholders without data duplication or having to generate a data feed. 

These are the capabilities found under risk and compliance: 

• Data lifecycle management: Uses Retention Labels to put all information on an automatic retention period without actually declaring files as records or making them immutable. You can decide whether labels are set to ‘retain-only’ or ‘retain and delete,’ the latter setting up disposition reviews or automatic deletion. 

• Records management: A subset of Data Lifecycle Management, records management allows you to upload a Records Retention Schedule as a File Plan and use Retention labels to declare files as records, making them immutable. You can also set the appropriate retention policy based on several factors that can be used as retention triggers. 

Via Purview, Microsoft provides options on how you can declare and manage documents that are considered records. Just as a document can inherit metadata by being placed in a particular document library or a folder in SharePoint Online, you can do the same and remove the burden of manual declaration of records by setting a retention label, with its associated retention and disposition policies based on the File Plan, at a document library or folder level.  

There are many legal and regulatory reasons why an organization may need to provide audit trail information for documents and records, and Purview provides two auditing solutions that go beyond the limited capabilities in core SharePoint: Audit Standard, which extends audit log retention to 180 days, and Audit Premium, which introduces audit log retention policies and extends audit log retention to 1 year or 10 years. 

Purview Risk and Compliance is also where you find Microsoft’s eDiscovery solutions; eDiscovery Standard and Premium. eDiscovery Standard provides search, case management and legal hold capabilities. Premium adds custodian management, hold notifications, review set filtering, predictive code models and a lot more features.  

In summary, Purview provides a lot of advanced features that are likely required in a legal document management scenario: 

• Sensitivity labels for document classification  

• Records Management 

• Audit trail retention for up to 10 years 

• eDiscovery 

SharePoint Online within Microsoft 365 provides the basic, core document management capabilities, but to add more advanced features such as records management, information classification, and AI-powered content processing requires additional product subscriptions in the form of SharePoint Premium and Microsoft Purview.  When you add the capability sets provided by these additional products, the SharePoint-based document management capabilities are approaching or even exceeding those provided historically by specialist legal document management vendors, providing a highly functional and suitable alternative.