Sometimes The Best Legal Tech Solution Is (Enhancing) What You Already Own

Intapp offers new tool extending Microsoft 365 functionality.

planner planning collaboration cooperation teamworkLawyers aren’t known for being early adopters when it comes to technology, so it’s not really a surprise to learn that legal departments remain married to clunky email chains and questionably secure file-sharing platforms. Why do lawyers insist on making everything slower and more cumbersome? It’s not like in-house attorneys are paid by the hour.

Sometimes the best bet for getting lawyers to adopt a better solution is to Trojan Horse it inside a platform the attorney already trusts.

That’s the logic behind Intapp Documents for Corporate Legal, a new offering announced this week that offers in-house teams a quick and easy path to improve collaboration:

“Many corporate legal teams are on a mission to become more rigorous about how they manage and use matter-related content, in order to more efficiently deliver the service the business depends on,” said Dan Tacone, President and Chief Client Officer at Intapp. “We’re excited to launch Intapp Documents for Corporate Legal to serve this need, helping in-house legal teams increase collaboration and manage the proliferation of matter-related documents and email directly within the Microsoft tools they already use.”

Moving everything under one trusted roof has obvious advantages. The lifecycle is clearer, process management is centralized, and most importantly, everyone already understands on some level how to use it. And when that trusted roof is Microsoft 365, the client brings the collaborative power to the platform they run… basically everything else in their professional life through.

Sheila Gormley, Intapp Senior Director of Collaboration and Content, explained that legal departments are faced with a choice that mostly boils down to vetting a whole new system and training everyone on how to use it or finding something that takes the existing, familiar system and leveraging it. And it’s a solution that Microsoft is more than happy to have Intapp provide, as the workplace standard software giant welcomes partners willing to tailor its offerings to specific use cases.

Intapp’s had a busy few weeks, with this announcement coming on the heels of a new strategic alliance with KPMG to combine Intapp’s industry-specific cloud solutions and KPMG’s compliance, risk, and consulting expertise. Originally I thought of this announcement as a separate story, but after chatting with Sebastian Hartmann, Vice President Alliances at Intapp, it turns out these are all gears turning in the same direction.

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KPMG has an established reputation as a consultant helping companies modernize their legal departments, through its Legal Operations & Transformation Services offering. KPMG has a long-standing partnership with Microsoft. Intapp is now offering a critical legal department tool that builds off the Microsoft 365 environment.

It’s like a symphony… but with collaborative legal solutions. Which probably wouldn’t sound much like a symphony, but you have to take the metaphors where you find them.


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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