This series on how SharePoint Online can be used for legal document management has covered basic document management functionality, advanced features provided by SharePoint Premium and Microsoft Purview, and how partners like ClearPeople and Colligo bring even more advanced features for knowledge management. This article will dive into the depths of a hidden gem in the world of SharePoint — metadata management capabilities. Learn what metadata is, why it’s useful, and what its significance is for law firms or corporate legal departments. 

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

Metadata is often described as data about data or information about information. Even if you have never done a deep dive into content or document management, you will probably be aware of metadata as attributes you can see for each of your files on your computer in Windows Explorer or in the Mac or Linux file explorers. For example, if you draft a document in Word and if you click on File in the top menu and then click on “Info” in the left-hand navigation, you will see a page that includes the document’s properties: 

One of the advantages of using a document management system is that you can start to add all sorts of metadata that helps you to understand what your documents are, what their content is, and in what context are they created and used. Metadata can be extremely powerful for enhancing the findability of your documents, providing more data for search engines to index and work with. As AI begins to power more of your work, good metadata helps your AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot provide you with the right information in response to our prompts. 

Given that metadata can be of such great utility, not just in document management but in legal document management specifically, it’s fair to say that: 

Metadata is additional data that describes your raw data and provides the context to turn raw data into useful information.  

Since the earliest versions of SharePoint, you have been able to create metadata fields for Document Libraries and Lists. In SharePoint terminology, these fields are referred to as columns, as that is how they are displayed in a Document Library. Each document is a row, and the columns are the associated metadata, as shown below: 

This is a powerful and flexible mechanism as is, but the progressive evolution of SharePoint has added even more flexible and powerful ways to work with metadata. 

Adding different metadata columns to different libraries is often necessary, but it can also be confusing when there are no standard metadata fields used across an organization with multiple SharePoint sites. Even if you have a single SharePoint site as your legal document management system, you will likely have multiple Document Libraries, so it’s important to establish a way to add structure and consistency. This is where the managed metadata service (MMS) comes in. The MMS brings some additional metadata concepts: 

• Terms: A specific word or phrase associated with an item on a SharePoint site. It has a unique identifier, and it can have many synonyms expressed as text labels. If required, some of the labels can be in different languages. 
• Term set: A group of related terms. Local Term Sets are available with a specific site collection, and Global Term Sets are available across all sites that subscribe to a specific MMS instance. 
• Taxonomy: A formal classification system that groups the words, labels and terms used to describe something and organizes those groups into a hierarchy. 
• Folksonomy: An information classification system that evolves over time as users of a system collaborate on the words, labels and terms used.  

The Microsoft 365 SharePoint Managed Metadata Service takes the concepts and uses them to organize advanced metadata management capabilities. The MMS has a Term Store where the terms used to tag content can be set and managed, either as: 

• Managed terms: Terms that are pre-defined by administrators into a hierarchical term set, which is a taxonomy. 
• Enterprise keywords: The keywords set uses terms added by users and is the basis for building a folksonomy approach to tagging. 
• Managed metadata column: A special type of column that can be added to Lists and Libraries, enabling users to select items from a specific term set.  

The MMS and Term Store are the tools that allow you to maintain consistent metadata across sites, lists, and libraries by adding managed metadata columns and specific terms to your content. Putting this into context, using the MMS and the Term Store allows you to build and manage taxonomies of specific legal metadata for use within your SharePoint-based legal document management system. 

A well-known and possibly one of the older metadata standards used with content and document management is the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, or DCMI. This has nothing to do with Guinness, as it is named for Dublin, Ohio, where the first meeting took place. DCMI provides open and publicly available standards that can be used by anyone.  

You can build very specific legal taxonomies for your particular practice areas. If you have a Knowledge Management attorney or team, you may have one or more built already, and it is easy to upload them to the MMS to use them in SharePoint. There are also commercial offerings; for example, Wand Inc. provides many industry-specific pre-built taxonomies, including a legal industry taxonomy. 

The importance of metadata to the legal industry is illustrated by the rapid rise of the SALI Alliance, a standards body that has developed the Legal Matter Standard Specification (LMSS) standard. The LMSS is a taxonomy of over 10,000+ tags developed to improve legal services classification.  

The LMSS provides interoperability between systems using the standardized terms through the provision of: 

• Code sets: More than a dozen standard code sets that define the common language for describing different aspects of legal matters. 
• A structure: The LMSS structure is a database that defines how codes, descriptions and values relate to each other.  

SALI licenses the use of the LMSS through the open-source MIT license and can be grabbed as XML files from GitHub.  

The more metadata you have, the better in most cases. However, having to manually add 25 fields of metadata every time you upload a document provides a poor user experience. Luckily, SharePoint has many ways to help with this, including ways to automate the addition of metadata to documents and the actual creation of metadata. 

Ways to automate the inclusion of metadata include: 

• Content types: A combination of templates (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and specific metadata fields, which can have default values added when a new file is created.
• Inheritance: Set default values for columns in a Document Library, and all documents will inherit these settings (metadata values) as a starting point. 
• Use document sets: A document set is a group of related documents that you can manage as a single entity. You change the metadata at the set level and change it for all documents in the set or add a document to the set, and it inherits the set’s metadata. 
• SharePoint Premium:
  • Machine learning models: Extract data from documents and create metadata from it.
  • Taxonomy tagging: Use AI to automatically tag documents with terms configured in the term store.
  • Image tagging: Use AI to tag images with descriptive keywords.
  • Auto-fill Columns: Automatically extract, summarize, or generate content from files uploaded to a Document Library using generative AI (e.g., Copilot) and save metadata automatically into columns. 

A key element of document management in any context, but particularly in a law firm or corporate law department, is the ability to generate and productively use metadata attached to documents. Generally speaking, the more metadata you have, the more exciting things you can do with it, like drive business process automation, data loss prevention, or records management. In a legal context, metadata can include information such as matter number, case number, the court or the judge’s names, jurisdictional information, the practice area, applicable regulation, client name and details, billing codes, and budget remaining. The only thing holding you back is your imagination, and SharePoint has powerful and flexible features and functionality that can help you maximize your imagination’s potential.