Why legal should use Microsoft Teams more in 2023

Besides a lot of negative outcomes of the pandemic in 2020, the health crisis also brought some positive key changes to daily workflows within companies and their teams. Never has online communication become so important, and the rise of virtual communication platforms is still a remarkable evolution.

One of the most well-known platforms, namely Microsoft Teams (MS Teams), seems to dominate the market as the best-in-class solution for online collaboration and supporting hybrid and flexible working areas. Working in MS Teams has become an inevitable element of daily practice for many legal professionals. And we have listed the most important reasons why legal departments should use MS Teams even more in 2023.

Increase the productivity and enhance teamwork

Microsoft Teams makes it possible to communicate and collaborate with clients and colleagues. Not only in person but also through messages, calls, file sharing, webinars, live events, meetings, and group chats. Heads of Legal, Attorneys, General Counsel, Paralegals, and their employees have found that Microsoft Teams provides an easy way to collaborate on projects and simplify teamwork.

For each project or case, you can easily create a team from scratch. How? By using an existing Microsoft 365 group or team. Invite in a couple of clicks people to collaborate with you, like for example your business colleagues, your clients, other lawyers, etc. If you want to add people outside your organization, you can add them as guest users to your team.

To improve the internal collaboration between legal and the business, you can form channels in MS Teams around a specific project of topic. Channels are conversations where you can chat, hold meetings, and share files. To navigate through all content within a channel, there are Tabs to use: Posts, Files and Wiki.

Streamline the communication flows within your organization by using MS teams. Share files, work together on documents, discuss ideas quickly and exchange you calendars. A best practice is creating Teams according to your projects or specific practice area. For example, if the different practice areas have the same members, you can create one team with separate channels according to the area.

Integrate smoothly with your current tools, way-of-working

As a service of Microsoft, it makes sense that Microsoft Teams is also linked to other Microsoft Office services, such as: Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, Power BI, SharePoint, Planner, Delve, etc.

On top of that, using Microsoft Teams doesn’t mean you have to get rid of other tools you normally use. You can add other tools and cloud storage platforms like Google Drive or Dropbox. Discover the full list of integration apps you can add to your Teams.

So, you don’t have to change your entire way of working to make the most of Microsoft Teams. On the contrary, MS Teams integrates and thus adds value to your current systems and tools. 

Get a 360° view on all stored MS Teams content in Knowliah

Unfortunately, Microsoft Teams has one downside. However, you share and create a lot of content in MS Teams, it is not recommended to house important company data within this platform. Why not? Because Microsoft Teams does not provide you with a secure back-up of information, and there is also no possibility to export the data that you have uploaded.

How do you ensure that you can refer to important documents, email, and data you’ve stored on MS Teams? Click on the Synchro Button in MS Teams to automatically create a Matter in your Knowliah system and have all your MS Teams information automatically stored also in another platform, the smart knowledge base where you centralize all matters with their documents and data automatically.

As the nr. 1 software to organize and leverage insights from your legal information, Knowliah has released the feature to automatically synchronise MS Teams sites with files in the Knowliah platform. This feature reassures that when MS Teams sites disappear, all important information remains neatly centralised and accessible within Knowliah. Keep the overload of MS Teams content and data under control!