The pandemic has caused the business world to accelerate its technology adoption. Even the legal vertical, which is not generally known for being on the cutting edge of technology, was forced to operate virtually, which meant lots of videoconference calls via Zoom. The word Zoom quickly became synonymous with an online call, in the same way that “Google” has become a verb meaning to use an online search engine.
Zoom was a quick and very effective fix for the pandemic’s communications issues, becoming the solution of choice over previously market-leading products like Skype and WebEx seemingly overnight. Microsoft had acquired Skype in 2011but was ending support for the business version of the product in 2021 in favor of its newer product, Microsoft Teams. The combination of the pandemic and the Skype timing definitely sped up the rollout of Teams, though it has taken a bit longer for the legal world to understand the impact it can have on collaboration.
While Zoom is a videoconferencing application, Teams is a collaboration platform that offers video calls as one of its features. The legal industry is beginning to embrace the tight integration between Teams and the rest of the Microsoft 365 world, but making Teams work in a legal environment requires careful thought around a variety of configuration and governance issues.
One major consideration is how teams and channels are provisioned. The first question is whether to allow users to create their own teams and channels, though this decentralized approach can lead to chaos. Many law firms and legal departments are accustomed to workspaces being created in their document management system for every client or matter that is opened in the firm’s accounting system. This may be overkill at first for Teams; firms may want to consider provisioning teams and channels only by request at first to avoid sprawl. Depending on anticipated volume, team provisioning may start as a manual process, but will likely need to be automated at some point. A variety of companies now offer a provisioning engine, though some firms may opt to code this in-house using PowerShell.
Once a team or channel has been created, there need to be policies around how the information in that repository is governed. Much like a document management system, security is paramount. Who has access to the team both internally and externally, and how is that controlled? Firms often have ethical walls in place to apply and maintain the correct security around documents; in a Teams environment, these policies should be enforced around not only files, but also posts and all the elements with which a user can interact.
While posts within a channel may be subject to one set of rules, chat (messaging between users or groups outside a channel) may be subject to a different governance and retention policy. For example, chat messages may be considered ephemeral and not critical to the substance of a client or matter, and therefore might be deleted after 30 days. Posts within a client or matter channel would likely fall into the same category as emails and documents for retention purposes. Overall retention of teams and channels is also an important consideration, especially as the number of teams grows. There are limits to the number of channels and teams that a Microsoft 365 tenant can have, though the usability of the Teams interface is likely to suffer before the technical limit is an issue.
Microsoft continues to add new features to all the applications on the 365 platform, and Teams is no exception. This is one of the benefits of the company’s “cloud first” posture, but it can create problems for IT and Information Governance groups who need to periodically review new features to ensure that they are taking advantage of the beneficial parts and disabling the parts that may not align with the firm’s security policies. For example, Microsoft has recently introduced a new feature called shared channels, which allows team owners to create channels to be shared with specific users outside the organization. This can open a new avenue for collaboration, but it also raises a variety of security and governance concerns.
Given the risks inherent in any kind of collaborative technology and the frequent updates and additions to the Microsoft 365 platform, some firms may take a conservative approach and decide against enabling these features. While this makes things easier in the short term, if clients decide to “host” the collaboration environment, firms lose the opportunity to govern that content.
At the beginning of the pandemic, video conferencing via Zoom seemed like the best way to keep businesses running – and it very well may have been. Had the work-from-home mandates lasted only a week or two, Zoom might have served its purpose as a stop gap measure, and we would have gone back to work and resumed business as usual. We could not have known then that we would still be dealing with the disruption over two years later. Collaboration is still key to the way the legal world works, and firms that invest the time and energy into Teams will be able to take advantage of the platform that enables that collaboration.
