Microsoft Teams for Legal: 5 Tips for a Successful Launch

Law firms, financial institutions, and similarly situated industries have an ongoing and unique challenge – how to enable business professionals to work whenever and wherever while maintaining proper controls and systems. This has been an issue the legal industry has wrestled with since I first joined a large firm in 2005 and by January 2020, not much had changed. Yes, a few firms were bold enough to take some systems to the cloud, but most of us were still standing on the sidelines.

Enter Covid-19. Virtually every law firm and every law firm client moved their staffs to work from home in about two weeks’ time. Some of us did it more efficiently than others (high-five to the firms running fully virtual environments!) and by April, the next challenge was upon us. How could we leverage technology to enable a sense of connectedness among an even more geographically dispersed workforce?

By early April, the firm made the commitment to an expedited implementation of Microsoft Teams, one of the leading collaboration platforms within corporations worldwide. By mid-May, the entire firm had access to Teams. No matter where your firm is in its journey, consider these 5 tips before you launch.

1.    Build a small project team.

During some of our preliminary discussions around launching Teams last year, I’d swear we engaged about half of the IT department. Everyone from infrastructure to training to sys ops was a part of the conversation. While it’s important to engage all these teams (and more!) in your Teams deployment, it’s more important to take a very methodical and iterative approach to your roll-out. Just as you can’t boil the ocean, you cannot possibly solve every element of every concern in an expedited launch. For our project team, we organized around three work-streams: technical configuration, change management, and information governance. Each work-stream was led by a single manager, who coordinated cross-functional meetings and engaged the appropriate resources to deliver the elements of his or her work-stream. The project was led by a seasoned project manager and included one executive level stakeholder who communicated with other executives and senior stakeholders. This small project team meets daily to keep the project moving, using Teams and Planner to manage the work. Keeping the team small allowed us to not only evolve our approach as we learned more, but also to manage scope creep and make decisions more efficiently.

2.    Leverage available (free!) Microsoft resources.

Depending on your firm’s size, you may have access to general Teams specialists, assigned customer success resources, or even a dedicated account team. In some cases, Microsoft may offer other free resources to support your launch. While there’s no denying that Microsoft’s goal is a financial one – these days, adoption equals future spend – I found our Microsoft resources invaluable on our journey. As you work to understand configuration options, governance concerns, and new ways to work, it’s always great to have an expert or two on the team. There are also a ton of online resources around Teams, from live, instructor-led classes to online tutorials. I’ve found these classes valuable in educating myself and the members of my team.

One other word of caution. When you create a team, you’re actually creating:

• A new Office 365 group
• A SharePoint Online site and document library to store team files
• An Exchange Online shared mailbox and calendar
• A OneNote notebook
• Ties into other Office 365 apps such as Planner and Power BI

Getting educated about how these new objects will be managed, scaled, and maintained is critical to your success. Encourage your folks to watch, read, and connect with Microsoft resources as much as possible.

3.    Start with the configuration settings.

I know this may sound crazy to change management pros but stick with me here. Teams is a big ol’ hairy beast, fraught with pitfalls, gotchas, and all manner of rabbit holes. And it’s on the same type of evergreen schedule as Windows and Office – meaning updates and changes will come on a regular basis whether you’re ready or not. This new reality of constant updates makes the multi-year deployment plans of our past ancient history. Even if you’re not trying to deploy in 4 weeks like we did, it’s essential that you adopt an agile (small ‘a’) approach to Teams.

I suggest starting with a review of the configuration settings because it will identify the questions you need to answer. For instance, there is a setting to “allow guests to create and update channels.” That gave us all immediate pause. Do we even want guests (external people) in Teams at this early stage? There’s also “owners can delete sent messages of others.” It caused us to discuss and decide who would be allowed to be team owners (with all the rights that carries) in the early release. These are both issues we surely would have come upon, but we were able to identify, discuss, research, and decide upon at a much earlier stage because we started with a review of configuration settings. We’ve certainly all been a part of a project where you spend a lot of time defining how you’d like a product to work only to find there’s no way to enable settings to meet the desired end state.

For what it’s worth, our technical team created an Excel file with all the available configuration settings that the project team reviewed several times before our initial launch. We recorded the desired setting in a column as well as any notes or questions. After conducting further testing or consulting with Microsoft, we’d add a column to note the changes to be implemented.

4.    Be prepared to ask yourself some tough questions about your DMS.

One of the main challenges facing law firms in their adoption of Teams is the dreaded “Files” tab. Every channel includes one. And, no, you cannot disable it. Within this glorious Files tab, your users can draft and save documents outside any prescribed data structure, as well as collaborate and co-author these files with no connection to your DMS. While the big players in the document management space have started developing integrations with Teams, most I’ve seen don’t fully solve the problem as of today.

If you’re anything like me, the heartburn will eventually turn to deep examination of your policies around the DMS. If we can associate files with a client-matter number and maintain version control in Teams, must they also be in the DMS? Do you already have unstructured data in client-matter folders on network shares? Teams is certainly better at managing files than that. And especially if you’re leveraging an enterprise search platform instead of relying upon the proprietary search capabilities, you may start to question the value of your DMS. While I’m not suggesting any of us will be closing down our formal document management systems tomorrow, I do think new tools, like Microsoft Teams, are going to make us all think long and hard about whether these expensive systems we’re all relying upon have delivered upon our substantial investment.

5.    Hold client-matter work out of scope for launch.

Business users like IT, HR and Marketing can find easy and immediate value in using Teams. Generally, these groups aren’t storing every file in the DMS as they work today. Since they spend most of their time collaborating with the same groups of people, Teams is an ideal place to work. Teams can also simplify initiatives where business professionals and lawyers are collaborating, like pitches and RFPs.

When you think about client-matters teams, you will need to consider whether Teams can integrate well with your current DMS and how long you’ll retain the Conversations within Teams (did I mention those are stored in an Exchange mailbox?!). If you have technologically current retention policy, many of these issues will fall under existing policies. However, there are some issues around access, ethical walls, and document sharing that will probably require new approaches and new ways of thinking that may be unfamiliar territory for your General Counsel. We’re not quite there yet ourselves, and so there’s more to come on that subject.

What about your firm? Have you rolled out Teams? What advice would you share?

Cheryl Wilson Griffin is a strategic IT executive with more than 18 years’ experience collaborating with firm leadership, lawyers, and their clients to solve business problems and exploit opportunities using innovative technologies.