Matter Center Helps Legal Firms Do Better Business

As you might imagine, Microsoft employs one of the largest corporate legal teams in the world. Having access to Microsoft’s development team, the legal team has used tools such as Office 365 extensively and has benefited from customization of those tools to enhance their utility in a legal environment. If you’re legal professional you’re probably asking yourself how this helps you. Well the great news is that Microsoft is now making these enhancements more broadly available to their legal professional customers through an add-in called Matter Center.

By working with a Microsoft partner, like Managed Solutions, your firm will be able to enjoy the enhancements made possible through the work of Microsoft’s Legal & Corporate Affairs (LCA) team. Once installed, Matter Center allows your team to create or view legal matters right from Outlook; tie Word, Excel, OneNote and other files to those matters; and securely collaborate with other legal professionals inside or outside your organization.

By working with nearly 200 law firms and partners in the legal industry, the LCA team was able to solicit feedback and input that went into building a world-class solution for the legal profession. Learn more about the development of Matter Center by the LCA team in this short video.

Here’s a quick rundown of the key benefits that will make Matter Center a game-changer for your legal practice:

• Complete integration with Office 365 – Create and view right from Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote and all the tools your team already has experience with.

• Seamless mobile experience – Access Office 365 and Matter Center across all devices – PCs, Macs, tables and phones whether using Windows, Apple or Android OS.

• Powerful and intuitive search and data visualization – You can easily and quickly search, find and retrieve matters and related documents across all cases.

• Pinning and tagging – Track and pin frequently used matters and documents for easy access.

Learn more about boosting productivity for your office, both your team of legal professionals and for any IT professionals you employ or contract, with Office 365 and Matter Center.

Running Matter Center in the cloud will require Office 365 and Azure subscriptions. Matter Center has been designed to support multiple deployment configurations as well, whether on-premises or hybrid cloud. Managed Solutions can help your firm implement Office 365 and Matter Center quickly and cost-effectively. You can scale up and out at a pace that makes sense for your practice.

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Boost law firm productivity with Matter Center for Office 365

As written by Tejas Mehta on blogs.office.com

We are pleased to unveil a preview version of Matter Center for Microsoft Office 365 at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Matter Center for Office 365 is a powerful documentation management and collaboration solution specifically catered toward law firms and law departments.

Working seamlessly with Office 365, Matter Center offers those in the legal profession a way to intuitively find and organize files without leaving the familiar productivity tools they use the most—namely Microsoft Outlook and Word. Matter Center for Office 365 enables professionals to quickly locate and collaborate on legal matters from virtually anywhere, anytime—from any device. In essence, a one stop shop for all your document collaboration and management needs.

Matter Center is the product of months of collaboration between our Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) group, outside law firms, and Office 365 product engineering teams. We are excited to have built the solution by using the cloud app model for Office 365, enabling Matter Center to expose rich document management, search and collaboration features directly through Word and Outlook. For external sharing and collaboration scenarios, Matter Center integrates with OneDrive for Business to maintain the ‘legal briefcase’ lawyers are familiar with.

The Matter Center experience

We made Matter Center easy to navigate, delivering a consistent experience across your productivity tools. For example, you can search and find matters and related documents directly within Outlook, and track or pin frequently used ones as well.

Search and find matters or documents inline, or pin them for quick access directly from an email in Outlook
You can also file email or email attachments to a matter directly from the Matter Center app within Outlook.

File email or email attachments directly to matters from Outlook

Matter Center is also accessible directly from Office 365.

Matter Center landing page in Office 365

Matter Center delivers numerous benefits for legal professionals

Legal briefcase in the cloud. Matter Center integrates with OneDrive for Business. That means you get 1 TB of individual storage and a personal briefcase that automatically synchronizes your documents across all of your devices, and can be accessed online or offline.

Get more work done together. Gone are the days of emailing multiple versions of the same document. Securely share your files with others, both within and outside of your firm. With Matter Center, you can work simultaneously on your documents with other attorneys, using the automatic version control to quickly and easily track changes.

Robust matter and document search. The powerful integration between Outlook, Word, and Office 365 enables you to easily search and find matters or related documents directly in the familiar interfaces of Word or Outlook. You can effortlessly track or pin frequently used documents or matters, as well as track just the most recent documents or matters.

Secure access and permission control. With Matter Center for Office 365, you can grant or exclude your user’s access to a matter. All of the subsequent documents associated with the matter will inherit the same permissions, thereby reducing concerns about ethical walls and data leakage.

Reduced overhead and increased billable time. With Matter Center’s seamless experience, you reduce the amount of administrative resources needed to support a document management system, enabling you to spend more time working directly with clients, building lasting client relationships, and most importantly, providing a positive customer experience for your clients.

Matter Center also caters to the needs of IT professionals

Confidently move to the cloud. Matter Center offers a way to begin your journey to the cloud at a lower cost and reduced risk, enabling you to maximize the ROI on your existing infrastructure with enterprise-grade security, management, and administrative controls.

Deploy based on your terms. Matter Center can be deployed in the cloud, in a hybrid scenario, or as a part of an on-premises Microsoft SharePoint environment based upon a firm’s needs and existing infrastructures.

Maximize ROI on existing IT investments. Adding Matter Center to an existing on-premises solution such as SharePoint and Exchange will help you to realize greater value as a unified productivity platform.

Built on an industrial strength platform. Matter Center includes enterprise-grade security, management, and administrative controls, and is compliant with multiple industry standards. Permission control and taxonomy are centrally managed and applied automatically; legal professionals don’t interact with the back-end settings.

Always up to date. Deploying Matter Center in the cloud, reduces the cost and time of upgrades and migrations as Office 365 is always up to date. No patches or software upgrades are necessary, and Microsoft adds new value and capabilities on a monthly basis.

Higher-adoption rates. Matter Center has an intuitive interface, simplifies processes, and can be accessed directly from Microsoft Office products that are used every day. This tool satisfies the most important needs of users, while reducing training and support efforts.

We are excited to bring Matter Center for Office 365 to market in the near future, and look forward to helping legal professionals change the way they work.

Matter Center is currently available in a limited preview, and interested customers should visit http://microsoft.com/MatterCenter to learn more about signing up for our beta program.

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