The legal profession today faces many challenges due to COVID-19, like ensuring compliance and data security, sharing important documents with clients remotely, and keeping staff on the same page amid changing legislation and regulations. Thankfully, Office 365, which includes the Microsoft Teams platform, offers law firms and legal practices a comprehensive solution that reduces overhead, increases billable hours, enhances productivity, and provides the ability to work from anywhere around the globe.
Why Office 365 for Legal Teams?
Powered by the Microsoft cloud, Office 365 offers all the professional Office software you know and love, and is always up-to-date and highly accessible. Office 365 is designed to supercharge your practice with award-winning collaboration tools that make up Microsoft Teams. Office 365 with Teams offers secure document storage and sharing, real-time co-authoring, content management tools, enterprise search, and knowledge sharing, all while simplifying IT management and reducing your tech expenses.
Additionally, Office 365 offers secure access to all your documents and Teams spaces from PC, macOS, tablets, and other mobile devices. You can manage your practice digitally with confidence knowing that Office 365 is compliant with world-class industry standards, including ISO 27001, EU model clauses, HIPAA BAA, and FISMA. Office 365 has built-in capabilities such as permissions, versioning control, eDiscovery, and records management to ensure documents are managed, controlled, archived, and retrievable in one place with reduced overhead.
Going Beyond Chat and Shared Storage
Microsoft Power Automate and Power Apps enable your team to create custom applications in minutes that can do anything from streamline document approval processes to screen potential clients. Microsoft Planner and the To-Do app offer office managers and client coordinators tools to stay on top of their obligations, see timelines and deadlines at a glance, and seamlessly reorganize priorities.
Most businesses have distributed some type of internal survey as they try to balance employees’ personal lives and family needs vs. work lives and client needs during the COVID-19 pandemic and state-mandated business closures. Rather than spending hours combing through feedback from a free survey platform and transferring it into an Excel spreadsheet, your business can create the survey with Microsoft Forms and use an automatic reporting tool with Power Automate.
The pandemic also reinforced the importance of customer service and meeting clients where they are. Now is the time to empower your team with powerful scheduling tools that help provide excellent client service. Using Microsoft Bookings, clients can schedule meetings and calls from a secure and professional web interface, which syncs in real-time with your schedule and calendar apps.
Keeping all your data in the same ecosystem decreases the potential for devastating data breaches as well as the inconvenience of redundant workflows. These powerful tools enable your partners and staff to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on high-level priorities.
Secure Communication Is Key
Microsoft Teams offers a secure voice and video-conference platform insulated from the threats of malicious Zoombombing or uninvited guests. To get the most from the call, attendees can share screens and documents securely, collaborating in real-time and keeping everyone on the same page. Microsoft also offers advanced integrations and direct routing to your existing cloud phone systems, or you can move your entire system to a Microsoft 365 Business Voice plan.
Microsoft Teams and Office 365 encrypt your business data using the strictest security protocols. Teams enforces team-wide and organization-wide two-factor authentication, single sign-on through Active Directory, and encryption of data in transit and at rest.
Another advanced security feature included in Office 365 is a communication compliance content search. As the number of channels for communication within a business increases, so does the need to monitor those communications. Using Communication Compliance tools, your admin can set up predefined and custom policies to scan internal and external communications for policy matches so they can be examined by designated reviewers. Examples include sharing sensitive information such as confidential projects, upcoming acquisitions, mergers, earnings disclosures, reorganizations, leadership team changes, regulatory compliance in the financial and legal industries, and inappropriate communications that may harm your business or workplace.
The Big Picture
Microsoft Teams and Office 365 offer a single workspace and ecosystem to communicate with clients and staff, manage projects, store data, and collaborate remotely with every staff member and external stakeholder on only the projects relevant to them. Teams integrates with existing third-party applications, such as Trello or Asana, fostering better productivity, reducing the number of open applications, and eliminating time spent transferring data from one system to another. Compliance and governance, eDiscovery of private messages and communications, and data loss prevention policies (DLP) are all included, making Office 365 with Teams the most secure and best-value collaboration platform on the market.
Windows Management Experts has over 30 years’ combined experience as a leader in Microsoft cloud and infrastructure with over 100 production implementations under our belt. We’re a Microsoft Certified Partner with gold competency in datacenter, device, and deployment, and we get the job done right the first time, guaranteed! If you take your legal practice as seriously as we take providing the best Microsoft and Windows cloud solutions, call Windows Management Experts today to schedule a free customized consultation and to discuss the unique needs of your business.
