Microsoft have a product / solution developed for the Legal Industry and they have called this the ‘Matter Centre’ which is an evolution of Office 365 – their business service; unlike the other cloud services for Lawyers e.g. Drop Box and Box Matter Centre is a solution designed and considered for the industry, not just shoe-horned file sharing with case-studies.

How good is Office 365; Matter Centre for lawyers, barristers and Attorneys?

Well Microsoft have a big share of the market with their email client – Outlook and many solicitors use it; Matter allows Lawyers to quickly tag attachments to cases in Matter. The applications can be added to allow Lawyers to search within word for other cases and files saved in the secure cloud. The system also allows for Lync conversations to be produced in the same way you can use services such as live chat.

Using word and office online allow for articles to be written and edited by multiple people on and offline, which makes the system very powerful and Lawyers can share documents securely using the shared drive. Matter essentially allows you to work without being in the office; but it does assume your colleagues and clients are embracing the same software; we are not sure how well it interacts with other systems clients may have.

The features of Matter Centre that are relevant to Lawyers are;

• 1TB of cloud storage for briefcase
• Sharing and collaborating easily
• Intergrated into software you already use e.g. Word and Outlook
• Drag and drop from email into the cloud client drop
• Restrict access and storage
• Improve flexibility with clients

How is Matter Centre’s Security?

• The service is verified to meet requirements specified in ISO 27001, EU model clauses, HIPAA BAA, and FISMA.
• You own the data; Microsoft is the custodian or the processor of your data.
• 24-hour monitoring of data centers.
• Multi-factor authentication, including biometric scanning for data center access.
• Internal data center network is segregated from the external network.
• Role separation renders location of specific customer data unintelligible to the personnel that have physical access.
• Faulty drives and hardware are demagnetized and destroyed

If you use Office 365 already this is an affordable solution for a small – mid size law firm.

We make no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information in this article or by following any link in this article.