DWF: Transforming Microsoft Teams
Originally Published in Briefing Magazine, June 2021
A trio of transformation experts at law firm DWF outline the rationale for a collaboration with the team at Peppermint Technology that's leading development of the Peppermint platform – with the goal of helping people to work more effectively on all matters in Microsoft Teams
When Covid-19 accelerated the need for firms to find new ways for their people to collaborate in early 2020, DWF was perhaps more prepared than most.
Its group CIO Daniel Pollick, and head of strategic programmes David Eaglesfield, had both previously worked together on landmark change projects involving the precursor to Microsoft Teams at the law firm DLA Piper – introducing instant messaging via Skype for Business and ditching the traditional desk phone setup, for example. “We had wondered even then about the prospects for ideas such as ambient news feeds within collaboration methods in a legal context, and kicked off a project to explore it,” recalls Pollick.
“We were excited about finding something that would replace email, and that’s also my particular excitement here and now. For the first time we can see a new centre of gravity building in terms of how people will work, which makes it really important to invest wisely to get the experience of that right.”
Case considerations
He is referring specifically to the roadmap for how DWF will manage its work differently in the near future thanks to this early appreciation for MS Teams – something that also connects to another strand of technology change for the firm. When Pollick took up his role in 2018, his new firm was also in the market for a new case management system to make itself more efficient generally.
Head of applications and development Sam Charman says: “We’d spent a couple of years reviewing our options.” The challenge, she explains, was to find something that could satisfy the needs of a wide range of work types within DWF – the high-volume, highly automated end, but also commercial and the firm’s expanding managed services offering. “A platform that also enabled movement on collaboration was certainly not just the next ‘shiny toy’, but critical to the firm’s overall strategy.”
Pollick adds: “The hope was that case management would become matter management – and then we realised there was a potential golden point of convergence whereby we could push all this effort and focus in the same direction.”
Mario and Luigi
The final piece of the puzzle in this endeavour – code-named ‘Project Mario’ – was the choice of platform to facilitate it. The job went to the cloud-based legal tech business Peppermint Technology. There was a synergy here, as DWF had already carried out substantial work in terms of readiness for the Microsoft Azure cloud, while as a Microsoft independent software vendor, Peppermint was also understandably focused on further exploration of what was possible with Teams.
Pollick says: “We could see that Peppermint was capable of being a matter management platform for all our work, but another big factor was that it wouldn’t turn us into an isolated technology island. It’s based on the tech stack that our users are already largely living in, and the one we believe they will increasingly live in.”
Unless communication is purposefully formal, or perhaps transporting a file, it’s now very likely that it will be a Teams exchange at DWF, he explains. “And we also know people want to be able to interact with our other tech by clicking a button in an email – or a channel – rather than entering a separate system for it.
“The pandemic has really accelerated our users into a relatively vanilla Teams world, which has now become its own driver of further change – they want to be there, and they want more.”
Fellow travellers
That’s where Mario morphs into associate ‘Project Luigi’ – a collaboration between DWF and Peppermint to transform the Teams experience (and yes indeed, named after the pair of notoriously colourful plumbers).
Eaglesfield explains: “The challenge for firms now is surfacing more useful information and functionality in Teams. Peppermint has that vision, and we believe in it.” There are already weekly meetings of a joint project team – with Mike Walker, chief technology officer at Peppermint – on developing a lawyer-focused Teams application that delivers this. And DWF has assembled a user group to incorporate feedback and ensure relevance.
He continues: “The goal is to pull all the data a legal team could require surrounding a matter into that new day-to-day environment, and then to give that rich conversation greater permanence rather than risk losing the detail in multiple inboxes.”
Pollick expands: “You could envisage having a dedicated channel for a given matter, private access for everyone involved, and where all are simultaneously notified when a bill status changes or a new version of a document is created.”
Charman adds: “The team has already developed a supervision feature, which gives the flexibility of working directly within either the Teams or Outlook environments using the Microsoft Teams Approvals app – and the opportunity to federate could also transform the way we engage with our clients in future.”
The first case management integration is now on the cards for later this year as well – a “super-exciting moment”, but Pollick stresses that all eyes here are very much open as to the challenges on the road ahead. “It has to be said that the platform isn’t perfect, it needs work to make it more scalable, and we also need to be very careful not to sink user experience under the weight of too many integrations.”
But it’s a journey that DWF and Peppermint are better on together, all agree. “I can honestly say I’ve not experienced as collaborative a partnership with a provider in my career,” says Eaglesfield. “Peppermint’s depth of knowledge here is helping to inform our future technology strategy.”