University College London optimises legal document management with SharePoint Online

The Background

The University’s Legal Services department is involved with a large number of matters across the whole institution.

The work required in relation to these matters produces a huge volume of documentation and correspondence, all of which needs to be maintained, made accessible to the Legal Services team (with appropriate restrictions) and readily searchable for a variety of different purposes.

The team was reliant upon saving documents and information in a Microsoft Office folder structure and saving email messages (the bulk of correspondence) in Outlook subfolders.

This approach had become increasingly unwieldy and unworkable, and created risk.

Consequently, the Legal Services department identified the  requirement for a comprehensive, reliable and easy to use document management system as an absolute priority.

The Solution

To solve the problem for the Legal Services team, we designed and implemented a secure and searchable Legal Matters Management solution, based on SharePoint Online.

In addition, we developed a custom solution to manage a unique ‘matter reference’ that was applied to all documentation to ensure its uniqueness within the system.

This ‘matter reference’ was also embedded into the document templates used by the legal department.

A third party email add-in was also used in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook to allow users to easily drag and drop emails into a document set, which would also be tagged with the required metadata for the matter (e.g. case number, unique reference, etc.)

The Results

Delivered on a SharePoint Online platform, the solution has resulted in a far greater degree of visibility across all matter correspondence and has provided the Legal Services team with a platform that allows them to store all matter documents and correspondence together and group items into a single matter using a unique reference.

Drag and drop integration with Outlook allows the users to easily link emailed correspondence to a particular matter, and the power of SharePoint allows matters or specific items to be located easily, supporting a more streamlined and effective approach to matter management.

To help the University’s SharePoint support team support, manage and develop the solution, we provided detailed design documentation, as well as a comprehensive implementation and administration guide.