Our SharePoint Online document management solution significantly improves the storage, linking, searching and managing of documents and correspondence, enabling the legal professionals to be more effective and risk to be reduced.
Sector
Higher Education
Users
18,000
Solutions
Microsoft SharePoint Online
Founded in 1826 in the heart of London, University College London is one of the world’s leading universities, with approximately 18,000 staff and 50,000 students from 150 different countries.
The Challenge
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.
Following a short tender process, Silversands (now part of the Chess Group) was engaged to provide a suitable solution.
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.
The solution architecture utilised SharePoint document sets to provide a logical grouping for all documentation and email correspondence relating to a particular legal ‘matter.’
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 Result
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.
In the end, the solution significantly improves the storage, linking, searching and managing of legal matter documents and correspondence, enabling the legal professionals to reduce wasted time and be more effective working on their cases.
