Microsoft 365 and SharePoint now offer law firms a compelling foundation for content, knowledge, governance and AI. But there’s an important caveat: SharePoint on its own isn’t a legal DMS.
It wasn’t designed specifically around the structures and working practices of a law firm. Matter-centric organisation, legal metadata, email filing, ethical walls and other specialist requirements still need to be accounted for.
So, how do firms add that legal capability without giving up the broader Microsoft 365 platform opportunity?
Adding legal structure to the Microsoft foundation
As always, there is more than one approach to this challenge, but at Cloud Essentials, our frontrunner is Epona: a specialist legal document and knowledge management layer built on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
Rather than moving legal content into another proprietary repository, Epona adds that legal layer around content that remains within the firm’s Microsoft environment, providing the specialist capabilities needed for a matter-centric legal DMS.
With Epona in place, content is organised into matter workspaces and enriched with legal metadata; documents and emails can be filed into the matter record; and permissions and ethical walls can reflect the access requirements around individual matters.
That legal context also carries through into search and matter lifecycle management, giving firms the structure to manage content consistently from active work through to closure and beyond.
And that structure has value beyond managing the matter itself.
From document management to knowledge management
Epona’s matter-centric structure and legal metadata give content context beyond the document itself – what matter it belongs to, what it represents and how it relates to the firm’s wider body of work. That makes it easier to identify content with value beyond its original matter and surface it to lawyers working on similar issues elsewhere in the firm.
Crucially, that doesn’t require creating another information silo. Useful content can remain within the Microsoft 365 and SharePoint environment while being surfaced more widely as part of the firm’s knowledge resources.
Nor does becoming ‘knowledge’ mean losing the controls and context around the original content. Permissions still determine who can access it, while its legal context helps lawyers understand what they’ve found and whether it is relevant to the work in front of them.
The result is a closer relationship between the DMS and KMS: the same structured matter content can support the work happening today and, where appropriate, become useful knowledge for the firm tomorrow. And because it remains within Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, firms can also build on Microsoft’s wider search and AI capabilities to help authorised users securely discover and work with that knowledge.
The best of both worlds
For law firms, the attraction of this model is the ability to get the specialist legal experience they need while retaining the wider platform advantages that made Microsoft 365 attractive in the first place.
Epona provides the legal structure around the content; Microsoft 365 and SharePoint remain the underlying foundation. Together, they create an environment that can support both the immediate demands of matter-centric document management and the firm’s wider ambitions around knowledge and AI.
Getting started
Choosing the platform and legal layer is only part of the equation. The next question is how to design the architecture, security and governance around them so the environment remains controlled, scalable and usable in practice.
Explore more topics in our legal DMS series:
Build a more secure, governed and AI-ready foundation for your firm. Talk to us today about how to modernise your legal DMS.
