From Outlook to Teams: rethinking how to unlock productivity in law firms

Increasing productivity may be the most common performance indicator upon which new technologies, systems, and processes are measured. As such, the overwhelming attention senior stakeholders (66%) are giving productivity, as reflected in this year’s Briefing Frontiers survey, is not all that surprising.

But the landscape of productivity solutions has undeniably transformed. In part, this is because over the course of the past two years, where lawyers work has changed – and I’m not just talking about from working from home. In a recent past, basecamp for lawyers was the email inbox – a service now increasingly facing secondment to formal occasions, escalations, and e-sign requests. Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams has by and large taken over – and it’s easy to see why.

Microsoft Teams is slick, multifaceted, interactive, and embedded not only in the flow of work but the flow of each day. We’ve become accustomed to a world where by way of colour-coded dot, we know when we’re going to get an answer. Documents, chat, meetings, and planners are all in one place. It’s a poster child for productivity. But there’s an elephant in the room - it’s not built for law firms.

The challenge law firms face post-work-from-home-order is they’re in a modern productivity halfway house. They may have Microsoft Teams or another collaboration platform where they work day-in-day-out but there’s an absolute disconnect between this and the weightier, nitty-gritty, platforms they use for the likes of client relationship management, case and matter management or time and billing. A lot of time is spent transacting between systems and platforms which still struggle to talk to each other (some things just never change).

It’s a challenge at Peppermint we have fully committed to overcoming in legal in a truly innovative way. Because in order to truly achieve optimal productivity, there needs to be integration, and software needs to be responsive to the context of how and where lawyers work. Empowering lawyers with a one-stop-shop and cross-platform hub turns the dial towards productivity to drive outcomes and client service excellence, rather than productivity for the sake of measuring the time taken to achieve a task. This means as a fee earner, delivering great customer service is more important than worrying about what number of hours you’re charging for it. Not only is that productive, but it’s also disruptive.