matter-centric guide to microsoft teams

Matter-Centric Guide to Microsoft Teams

Prosperoware Best Practices

Written by Sheetal JainCTO & Co-Founder, Prosperoware

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Challenges for the Legal Industry

By some counts, Microsoft Teams is the second fastest-growing product in Microsoft history after Office. Teams is an enterprise software used for chat and collaboration. To those who use it, Teams has become an omnipresent application that is always open on one’s computer and phone. Teams has also transformed into a hub for other applications, or a place to get relevant information from other applications via hundreds of connectors, bots, and tabs.

If used properly, Teams reduces the volume of internal emails. At Prosperoware, since launching Teams as our primary internal communication tool, we have seen a 70% reduction in email volume. Removing internal communication from the inbox allows our team to promptly respond to external emails from clients and vendors. Otherwise important client correspondence would get lost amid internal communication.

Furthermore, internal emails with larger threads (usually banters) have become a nuance for productivity. While Teams cannot prevent users from creating a large thread of messages on certain channels or topics, it mitigates clutter in our team’s mailbox.

The three key objects in Microsoft Teams are Team, Channel and Private Chat.

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• Private Chat: Are equivalent to Skype for Business. You can chat with one or more individuals outside of a

The legal and professional services industries are among few industries with a high volume of concurrent projects. If you consider every matter as a project, the number of matters in any given firm (depending on the size of the firm) can be huge. On average, a large firm opens a few hundred to thousands of matters in a month. Depending on the type of industry, a lawyer may be working anywhere between 10 to 500 matters within a year.

Provisioning such a large amount of matters as individual Teams, and then managing their life cycles, are two key adoption challenges with Microsoft Teams.

Legal is also one of the unique industries where law firms are one of the largest custodians (a.k.a sub-proces-sors) of someone else’s data. In addition to Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCG), a law firm must comply with a myriad of data privacy and governance laws. Any system and third-party vendor that law firms use must comply with those regulations.

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Team: Is a top-level container. A Team can be created for a project (matter), department, client, office, committee, to name a few. A Team can be private or visible to everyone in the organization. Microsoft supports 500k Teams per organization. With every Team, a SharePoint site and Office 365 group is created. A Team can have up to 5,000 members. And a user can be part of 2,000 Teams at any given time.

Channel: Think of them as a folder. A Team can have multiple channels (up to 200). Every Team is created with a default channel called “General” and has a document folder in the SharePoint library, tabs, and chat. By default, a channel has the same security as the Team where it lives. Teams also supports the creation of up to 30 private channels. As a best practice, our recommendation is to use Private Teams over private

Team or Channel.

The Right Mix of Teams

Microsoft Teams (like all other Microsoft products) is a horizontal product. While Microsoft provides guidance and best practices, it is an out-of-the-box system. One has to use imagination and experience to configure the right mix of teams and channels based on industry type, culture, and organization size. Training is required to educate users with posting on appropriate Teams and Channels.

While deciding how many Teams an organization should create, there is no one right answer. Here are some guidelines that Prosperoware suggests:

Matter Team

Given the large number of supported Teams (500k per organization) and security models, we recommend firms to create one Team per matter. The important thing is to provision each Team with the right matter team to avoid clutter.

Channels

How many Channels should a Team have? Depending on the type of matter, multiple channels can be provisioned. The “General” channel should be used for announcements. For some matters, the General channel is good enough. For others, such as litigation, multiple channels might be beneficial. You can create a channel for deposition and communication, among others.

If you intend to share Teams externally, keep some of the internal channels private and limit external user access.

Tabs

Tabs are designed to quickly link Teams to other relevant content, whether it exists in Office 365 or elsewhere. Firms can use tabs to link to a website, their Document Management System, litigation software, docketing, court, or billing systems.

Department (or Practice Area) Team

Department-level Teams can act as a knowledge center and internal communication hub for the firm’s different practices. This is where a practice group leader can have their team chat, post best practice documents, department goals, and more.

Office Team

For larger firms with multiple offices, the office-level Team can provide a common place to view and share local office events. An Office admin can communicate upcoming local events, birthdays, cafeteria menus, holiday reminders, and visitor’s announcements for the office Team.

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Firm Team

A company-level Team becomes the central point of communication for the entire firm. This is where the leadership Team can post shout-outs, new hire and promotion announcements, and policy changes, among others.

Firm Team should be created as public or organization wide. Currently, there is a maximum limit of 5,000 members per Team.

Client Team

If the client is small enough with limited ongoing matters, firms can also structure Microsoft Teams as client-centric to manage matters.

Each team can represent a client with channels created for each matter as long as the total number of matters is less than 200 (currently only 200 channels can be created per Team). If you intend to share the system externally, make sure to create private channels for any internal communication and do not give clients direct access.

If a firm still wants to maintain a matter-centric instead of a client-centric structure, it can create Client teams for client-related communication.

Private Chat

Private chats should be limited to private-only communication between employees. Sometimes employees are more comfortable chatting individually rather than posting to a channel. This mainly occurs due to the fear of being judged as their post may be visible to more people than initially intended.

The danger of posting project-related content in private chats is that new team members are deprived from that information. Searching in private chats is one of the weaker features in Teams, making it more difficult to locate content and information shared. This process becomes even more difficult when someone leaves the organization. On top of that, applying information governance policies is harder on private chats than teams and channels.

Tip: Encourage team members to avoid private chats for any matter-related discussions.


Governance Challenges for Legal

For any enterprise software, Information Governance is a key concern for Security and Risk teams. Microsoft Teams is no exception. While Teams has many built-in governance and administrative capabilities, there are still areas of which law firms should be aware.

Provisioning

While Teams can easily be created (in fact, too easily), there is no out-of-the-box automatic way to create Teams without a product like Prosperoware CAM.

Archiving

Teams provides an option to manually archive Teams. However, there is no automatic way to archive Teams by keying off other Records or Retention management systems or to trigger archiving when a matter is closed in the billing or matter management system.

Transfer Content to Other Systems

Some firms prefer to use Teams as the working file for a matter, but once the matter is closed, there is a need to move all the content of channels and chat messages into a document management system.

Archiving a Team within Microsoft Teams still counts towards 500k limit.

Litigation Chicago Matter -1 Matter - 2 Client - 1Firm

General

Random

News

General

Goals

General

Cafeteria

Events

General

Depositions

Trial-Preps

Billing

General

Research

Billing

General

Billing

Figure 1: Sample Teams for a Firm


Applying Ethical Walls and Confidentiality Policies

While Teams offers a robust security model, there is no automatic provisioning of security or enforcement of security on an on-going basis.

Metadata

Teams has limited metadata, with only the name and description of the Team. There are no other tags or custom fields to tag Teams by client, matter, or department code. This makes it challenging for unified governance policy across systems.

Bulk Updates

Microsoft Teams has a robust set of APIs and PowerShell commands. However, Admin and Power User Options to manage across multiple teams and channels are limited or non-existent. If you need to update names or security of multiple teams at once, one must use APIs to perform those bulk updates.

Removing or Hiding Teams

With the “Focus” feature, Microsoft Teams automatically hides inactive Teams from a user’s list. These Teams can be accessed from the “more” option or they automatically become active once there is activity. While 500k is a very large limit from a law firm perspective, this may be an issue. Firms must carefully plan archiving and deleting teams to stay under that 500k limit dates.

Disabling or Removing Users

When a user is removed, all personal chat for that user becomes invisible, and some chats are even deleted. When the Teams chat messages are not deleted, the messages are displayed as “unknown” user. This makes it difficult to understand who had originally posted the message. Before removing a user, one should make sure there are no sensitive or private messages that could be relevant to a project. Those messages should then be manually preserved or copied to a channel in the relevant Team.

Owners vs. Members

Team supports two types of roles – owners and members. Owners manage all aspects of a Team. By allowing end-users to be an owner of the Team, it weakens the governance of the Team. Teams created by products like Prosperoware CAM eliminate this issue by not making the end-user an the owner. And by automatically provisioning Teams, channels and users, the need for any end-user to be the owner of a Team is greatly reduced.

Prosperoware’s recommendation is to assign an Admin account as the team owner. This gives better control to administrators and eliminates the need for clean-up when a user leaves the organization. Ownerless Teams is one of the major issues with Teams.


Ethical Walls and Confidentiality

Teams security model does not support ‘exclusion.’ One must be an explicit member of a group (except for Public Teams) in order to have access. Microsoft offers Information Barrier policies (IB) within Teams. This allows organizations to define information barriers as Office 365 policies. Microsoft will enforce these barriers when someone updates Team Membership or requests a Private Chat.

Best Practices

• Limit Who Can Create Teams: By default, all users can create Teams. This should be disabled out-of-the-box

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Caution: If the user is the sole owner of some Teams, make sure a new owner is assigned before removing the user.

E-Discovery

E-Discovery and legal hold are important for all businesses, and in particular, legal. Luckily, Microsoft provides eDiscovery search through which one can collect all relevant information from Teams, Channels, Private Chats, and files.


which can be done in the UI.

Naming Conversations: Since Teams does not support additional metadata, it is very important to design consistent naming conventions, otherwise it can quickly turn into a nightmare. Multiple or ad hoc naming conventions can make it impossible to add or find Teams.

Limited External Sharing: External collaboration is one of the hallmark features of Teams. However, this should be carefully planned and monitored so it does not breach governance guidelines or become an administrative headache.

Third-party Integrations: Teams comes with a range of out-of-the-box apps. There are 500+ plug-ins, some of which transfer data to their websites. Unless fully vetted, these plug-ins should be carefully enabled.

Email: One of the advantages of Teams is reducing email clutter. However, one can also get carried away with overusing Teams. Chat messages are hard to search and make a poor choice for official records. Sometimes it is better to send an email than use Teams. This way there is a copy in the sent items in case the firm wants official records.

Setting Up Moderation: Teams supports setting up proper moderation on how messages are posted, use of emoji, GIF, and language check.

Removing Users: Removing a user can also delete all private chat messages or make it difficult for other systems to find them.

Microsoft also offers geo-location choices (for new tenants only). To find out where your content is stored, go to the Admin Portal in Teams and click on Data Location under Organization Profile.

Other Integrations

Teams comes with hundreds of out-of-the-box apps and bots integrations that can improve productivity. Teams also allows content display for any web page in a tab. This is a great way to cross-link internal and external applications and sites.

Some interesting applications that should be considered include:

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When enabling a third-party app or bot, one needs to carefully read the license and data movement policy. Some components may be transferring data into their site and in some cases to a geographic location that may be in violation of firms’ security and risk policies.

Type Location

Private Chat

Team Conversations

Private Chat Files

Teams Files

Private Channel

Voice Mails

Meeting Recordings

A Hidden Folder in User’s Mailbox

Shared Mailbox

One Drive

SharePoint Site / Document Library

A Separate Site Collection

User’s Mailbox

Microsoft Stream


Data are stored in various places within Teams:

Document Management Systems (DMS): Vendors like iManage are working on building integration with Teams. In the interim, one can directly link to a matter or client workspace, making it easy to see all relevant information. If channels are created in parallel with a site, one can even directly link to a folder in the DMS, e.g., deposition channel can directly link to a folder in the DMS.

• CRM: Can display key client contact information.

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How CAM enables Matter-Centric Lifecycle Management

Prosperoware CAM is a platform for Privacy & Regulatory Compliance for Content Systems. CAM enables orchestration, management, and governance of Teams, Office 365, iManage, NetDocuments, HighQ & Kira systems. CAM can provision matter-centric Teams and related containers across multiple systems from the DMS to Teams.

Auto Provisioning of Matters (Teams)

Prosperoware CAM integrates with many commonly used Billing and Matter management systems from Aderant, Thomson Elite, Rippe Kingston to Prolaw, CPI, Clio and any application with REST API or databases access (if on-premises). CAM can automatically create Teams, Channels, Tabs, and Teams Users based on metadata from these source systems.

Auto Rename Teams

Similar to provisioning, CAM can also automatically rename a Team name when a matter, engagement, or project name changes.

Auto Rename Channels

CAM enables automatic renaming of channels if the channel was renamed and provisioned through platform templates.

Membership Updates

CAM also reads the membership of matters (if available) from billing or matter management systems. This can be an explicit list, or read from implicit metadata, such as responsible lawyer, billing lawyer, originating lawyer, associates, including their secretaries. It then automatically adds them to the group. Whenever this information is changed in the billing system, CAM automatically updates the Team.

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Financial Management Systems: By linking to financial management systems, one can provide a quick overview into the financial status of a matter, e.g., this can be a page in the billing system displaying the summary of current hours and Accounts Receivable.

Project / Tasks Management Systems: Teams provides out-of-the-box integration with many project management applications like Trello, Asana, Smartsheet, etc. One can connect to any other project management system if not available out-of-the-box.

Internal Systems: Teams allows you to display content from any website in a channel. If your internal application is web-based, one can link it to display its content into Teams.

Bulk Updates

CAM synchronizes all Teams, Channels, related SharePoint Sites, Documents, Security, and Audit information into the CAM database. This provides the ability to easily query all Teams across the organization and bulk update, e.g., add “L-” prefix to all Litigation matter Teams, or add a “JSmith” suffix to the end of matters where JSmith is the responsible lawyer.

Assigning Client Matter Codes

While Teams does not support custom metadata, CAM supports unlimited metadata on a matter. CAM is also a tracking system for all matters’ related content across multiple systems. One can associate one or more Teams to a CAM Matter (Project). Each CAM matter object has metadata including client & matter codes. This indirectly enables each Team to have these codes. One can search, report, and apply retention controls in bulk in Teams.

Reporting

In addition to synchronizing all metadata, CAM provides out-of-the-box reports and a SQL query interface to query Teams and Office 365 data via SQL query. One can write queries to gather all information about Share-Point sites, Teams, Channels, Audit and Security and then display results in the UI, export them into Excel or PDF or have them sent to someone via email. Frequently used queries can be saved and executed as needed or on a scheduled basis. Since it is a SQL interface, one can write simple queries to get types of data that otherwise require complex PowerShell or REST API code. For example:

• Find all Teams that Paul does not have access to

• Find all Teams where external users have access

• Find all Teams where Paul and Jill both have access

• Find all Ownerless Teams

• Add Jill to all litigation Teams

These types of reports are difficult to extract natively without API or PowerShell commands.

Data Transfer

Some firms prefer to have all matter-related content stored in a single centralized repository. This is usually the primary DMS system. CAM enables data transfer from Teams and OneDrive content into iManage, NetDocuments, or simply archived into the firm’s AWS S3 (CAM C4 license equired).

This indirect application of client & matter metadata on Teams allows the firm to apply retention policies against Teams, e.g., transferring all documents in Teams to the DMS prior to archiving or deleting the Team after the matter closes.


Adding Users to Teams

CAM can automatically add users to appropriate Teams by reading matter team information from the firm’s billing or matter management systems. Additionally, CAM enables service desk and IT users to update Team membership upon request without explicitly being owners of the Team.

Removing a User

CAM can automatically remove a user when a user leaves the firm or changes department, office, or matter team. Additionally, IT and Service Desk users can remove users upon request. The advantage of doing this via CAM is because CAM also has a consolidated audit log of all user activities across applications managed by CAM.

Ethical Walls and Confidentiality

CAM can act as an adapter to enforce ethical walls or confidentiality policies. CAM stores ethical wall and policy information in CAM Controls Center. Using Controls Center, CAM can proactively manage and update Teams security (CAM C5 license is required).

Retention

CAM Controls Center can apply retention polices. Retention polices can be as simple as making a Team read-only, archiving within Office 365, copying content to another system, and then marking Teams for archival or deletion, etc. (CAM C5 license required).

Conclusion

When used properly, Microsoft Teams is a productivity booster application. In today’s world where employees are spread across geographic boundaries and remote work is on the rise, effective collaboration is important for the success of any organization. One must carefully consider pertinent governance challenges and benefits of all features. Products like Prosperoware CAM help manage Data Privacy and Governance challenges and allow firms to focus on leveraging the best of Teams.

Happy Productivity!


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