Repstor: The explosive rise of Microsoft 365 in mid-tier law firms – a panel discussion

In February 2021, senior directors of two mid-sized UK law firms – Brachers and Conexus Law – came together with legal market advisor Derek Southall and Sheila Gormley, VP of Legal Solutions at Repstor, for a virtual discussion on the significant and growing impact of Microsoft 365 for transforming the way legal teams operate.

As well as debating Microsoft’s substantial footprint in the sector, the panel gave their perspectives on rising trends among law firms including IT consolidation, dispersed operating models, and the appetite to increase knowledge re-use, operational intelligence and process automation. Highlights of the discussion are summarized here.

The panelists:

Derek Southall, founder and CEO of Hyperscale Group, is a legal market watcher, advisor and IT specialist.

Tom Hall is COO at leading Kent-based law firm, Brachers, which recently celebrated its 125th year. He has an international background in both the finance and legal sectors, and works with the board to help drive growth and change.

Ed Cooke is CEO of Conexus Law, an 18-month old legal startup which provides legal advice to businesses operating at the intersection of the built environment, technology and people. He is an international lawyer, commercial advisor and skilled negotiator, whose previous employers have included DLA Piper and Bird & Bird.

Sheila Gormley, one of the co-founders of Repstor, looks after its legal software business globally. Repstor is an information management software company which helps law firms and corporate legal teams globally to leverage their Microsoft 365 investments in the delivery of legal use cases.

Derek Southall: We’re living through a massive period of change, but trying to reflect that in law firms has been difficult – until the COVID pandemic left them with no choice. There are a number of trends which are influencing the way law firms think about and plan for their IT now, which have been accelerated and magnified by the lockdowns of the last year.

A growing dissatisfaction with existing tech stacks

As firms try to organize themselves in new ways, their current model for managing everything – using separate finance systems, document and email management systems, and practice management/case management/CRM capabilities – isn’t giving them the flexibility they need.

Big businesses have already questioned the sense of running 200 discrete applications, when they could consolidate and simplify operations across fewer, core platforms. They’re now saying, “We’ve got to be SAP for finance; Microsoft 365 for everything operational; and Salesforce for sales and marketing.” I think this consolidation and focus on capability is coming to law firms now too.

Cost/value paradigms

Many firms are renewing the quest for value from their IT investments. Designated ‘legal technology’ tends to be more expensive than more generic solutions, which firms increasingly feel isn’t justified. The ‘best of breed’ approach also means dealing with multiple vendors which can become costly and difficult to manage.

The rise & rise of Microsoft 365

The meteoric rise of Microsoft 365 has come right in the midst of all this. As firms standardize on the online/cloud-based versions of the Microsoft suite, they’re seeing potential to work more flexibly using familiar, interlinked applications. Added to this is the realization that Microsoft 365 offers everything from digital dictation to smart process automation and reporting, Teams to intranet templates, and much more. Microsoft is investing everything in the latest functionality too, which means basing operations on the platform is a very safe bet for the long term.

Digital collaboration by default

Digital collaboration has become widespread during the pandemic, boosted by the intuitive ease and ready availability of facilities like Teams for keeping dispersed parties in continuous contact. It’s been so effortless to maintain relationships remotely over the last year that people are questioning whether things will ever revert to how they were, especially when virtual meetings save clients time and money.

Increasing interest in AI

Firms’ appetite for AI is growing too, though up to now there has been much confusion about how the legal profession might make best use of this. But firms will find they can automatically take advantage of the latest AI capabilities if they follow the Microsoft 365 route, as Microsoft is investing astonishing amounts of money in embedding the technology within its software to enable new productivity and insights.

Consolidation & custom-configuration

The ability to standardize on one mainstream platform and custom-configure more of what firms need without specialist development expertise is boosting the potential for innovation, too. We’re helping firms to realize that, whether now or in the future, they’ll be able to add a document drafting or review capability, a digital signature facility, or a lifecycle management capability, as part of Microsoft 365 – i.e. without having to go out and buy 15 different niche applications.

It’s for all of these reasons that we expect to see the same explosion of Microsoft 365 in mid-sized law firms that we’re seeing across the enterprise market. The only reason we’ve not seen it before now is that firms have had a lot of legacy technology to deal with.

But I’ll let Ed and Tom tell their own stories about how the pandemic has accelerated their ambitions for transformation.

“We started our transition Summer 2019, gradually moving our ‘ecosystem’ to one that will revolve around Microsoft and mobile devices as our operational platform.” said Tom Hall.

Ed: Conexus Law works internationally and our operations are quite distributed: we’ve got a central office in London but have a team that works all over the place. This put us in a great position when we when COVID-19 hit because we were already set up for working remotely.

Tom: Brachers has offices in Maidstone and Canterbury, but our work is international. When I joined in 2019 the firm had traditional legacy legal applications, but an appetite to excel and be different. I had some interesting conversations with the managing partner about the business continuity implications of people not being able to go to the office.

The measures they put in place materially changed the partners’ mind-sets about the need for improved remote capabilities – not just to support home-working but also for lawyers attending court, needing access to financial data or legal documents. We ripped out legacy legal systems in favor of cloud and SaaS applications, and implemented a mobile-first strategy, giving every lawyer a tablet. When COVID hit, people simply took their devices home and picked up where they left off.

Derek: In building Conexus Law from scratch, how did you arrive at your current IT stack and what has been your Microsoft 365 journey?

Ed: We opted for a cloud-first strategy. As a distributed firm we needed everyone to have instant access to the most up-to-date versions of everything, and we felt that that using a cloud system would enable us to do more with data.

We have a Microsoft 365 stack primarily, with a SharePoint Online base/ central data repository, so there’s just one system to manage and secure. We chose Repstor as our document management system, on top of Microsoft 365, because in its native form SharePoint didn’t really offer us the kind of experience we needed. We also have a practice management system which integrates readily with Microsoft 365, and an accountancy back-end. Otherwise we use the Microsoft Office suite including Teams and Power Automate.

By joining all of our systems together, we’re honing our knowledge management which is critical to what we do. We work with clients who are pushing the boundaries so we have to do the same. As well as our chosen systems for this, we find Microsoft OneNote very useful and we have a very flexible SharePoint knowledge hub: essentially a SharePoint wiki and internet site.

Tom: Brachers is a multi-disciplinary, full-service firm with lots of diverse needs. We favor Microsoft because its products are already so integral to the way lawyers’ work – so our view was why not leverage the licenses we’re already paying for. And Microsoft is pouring money into development at a rate that other most tech providers couldn’t even contemplate.

We incrementally moved to E5 as our needs developed and to leverage security and Power BI, giving us the ability to interpret data in ways we’ve never thought about before – data that’s refreshed every two hours or more if we want it. For Document Management Repstor gives us that legal layer on top of Sharepoint. It allows our lawyers to interact with their DMS from Outlook and in the future from Microsoft Teams, which is revolutionary. The fact that Repstor can give us client portals in all different forms – something clients are beginning to ask for – is transformational too.

We started our transition last summer, gradually moving our ‘ecosystem’ to one that will revolve around Microsoft as our operational platform. We’re keen to adapt with the market. Now that working from home has been robustly tried and tested, there’s no reason why our people, our client base couldn’t be more widespread. The Internet as well as our offices is now the place where our clients will interact with us. They might come to our offices occasionally for more formal activities, but the vast majority of transaction activities can now occur online – especially with digital signatures, etc.

Derek: When firms invest in Microsoft 365, it’s as a journey, isn’t it? What are you hearing at Repstor, from your law firm clients – about how they want to leverage Microsoft 365?

Sheila: It varies according to the size of the firm, but a lot of it is about achieving that legal DMS scenario. The biggest thing for us is surfacing the power of the SharePoint DMS through the Outlook or Teams user experience. In fact, the number one thing that law firms are asking us for today is functionality around Microsoft Teams. During the pandemic, many firms have opened up Microsoft Teams to keep colleagues connected. Then people started collaborating using chat windows, uploading content to it and so on. But that’s when risk, compliance and security people start to become concerned – that activity has deviated from the core DMS, with implications for content governance and safeguards. Restoring these controls is part of the solution that we bring.

We also cater for the reality that not everyone has a Microsoft 365 DMS platform, via integration with other applications firms may have. We can push content from Teams into their preferred system of record, whether it’s SharePoint or not. Collaboration with clients is another common requirement. Microsoft will continue to improve Teams functionality so that it becomes the gold standard for client collaboration. But there’s also the possibility to do more traditional and client portal-like collaboration in Microsoft 365 and we bring additional capability around that for legal use.

The IT consolidation trend generally is raising questions about how to get the most out of the Microsoft 365 platform. Power Automate offers fantastic potential, for example, but firms want to understand how to pull it all together. I sense an appetite for more turnkey solutions that leverage M365, so that smaller or mid-tier law firms don’t have to build the capabilities themselves.

Derek: Are there any activities law firms wouldn’t want to attempt in Microsoft 365, and what’s next?

Ed: As things currently stand we wouldn’t use it for our central practice management system [PMS], though there are probably things you could do with something like Dynamics. That starts to become expensive though.

Rather we’re always going to need that interface between M365 and a PMS. As we’re not going to use Microsoft 365 for our PMS, but we will for transaction management, it’s important that those two systems can be closely interlinked.

The client portal scenarios are important, too. Our clients tend to use Microsoft 365 so if you do want to establish that kind of client portal through Teams, for instance, it makes it easier if they have single sign on; if we can configure it so it appears like one of their internal systems. We work internationally and have to cooperate with law firms in other countries which we package together as a single service delivery to our clients. This creates another requirement: to give those clients a single pane of glass to view everything we are managing; and our partner firms so that they can appear to be working within our environment, with a consistent look and feel for clients.

We’re also looking at how we might deploy artificial intelligence or at least machine learning within some of our systems. We undertook an exercise looking at force majeure clauses, for example, which primarily we have had to manage manually. It would be great to use an AI
product for that.

The challenge is around having sufficient volumes of information ingested into the system so that it actually has a corpus of information to learn from. That’s tricky for law firms. So I’m wondering how Microsoft might be able to help us solve that problem. Certainly we’ll be looking very closely at Microsoft’s Project Cortex and SharePoint Syntax activities and hoping that some kind of legally-focused, AI-based product might emerge fairly quickly.

Tom: Although Microsoft are investing heavily in R&D, they can’t be everything to everyone. We’ve got a top PMS which is ideal for what we need so we wouldn’t look at Microsoft for that; nor for risk, compliance, nor CRM. To broaden out any further might be to dilute those strong points. For us, the integration point is key: that’s what Microsoft and Repstor make so easy.

“We’ll be looking very closely at Microsoft’s Project Cortex and SharePoint Syntax activities and hoping that some kind of legally-focused, AI-based product might emerge fairly quickly,” said Ed Cooke.

Derek: What’s the latest news from Microsoft in terms of specific legal capabilities?

Sheila: There’s a new initiative that Microsoft has launched in collaboration with ILTA. It’s an acknowledgement that perhaps it hasn’t given enough attention to the legal sector up to now, and it recognizes some of the particular requirements of legal teams – especially around security. One of the first things they’ve been doing is to release a ‘blueprint’ for the deployment of Teams within law firms, addressing security, data labelling and data loss prevention.

Derek: Finally, it’s accepted you should never buy technology based on price, but for long-term capability. To what extent will Microsoft 365 alter what law firms’ spend on technology? And will it help reset the pricing of some other products, freeing up budget for other things?

Ed: I don’t know what it will do in terms of the final price, but in terms of cash flow it turns everything into a subscription model.

Tom: The SaaS model is meant to make it easier to predict costs, and flex what you use and pay for. During COVID we were able to reduce licenses for individuals who were furloughed.

I actually think our bill for tech is going up, but we are realizing savings in other ways. If I can save a lawyer five minutes so that they can finish on time which is good for their mental wellbeing, that’s really important to us right now. Or, if they can do something themselves that saves them dictating and asking a secretary to do it, there’s a resource saving there, or there’s a beneficial effect on chargeable time. That’s really where our investment into technology is focused – on driving efficiencies, making life simple, having a single pane of glass, and so on, achieved by integrating everything back into our Microsoft platform.