Legal technology consultancy Pinnacle has created a Microsoft Legal Applications team that will help law firms to leverage their investment in Microsoft across their organisation. The team unites Pinnacle’s BI and Microsoft practice groups.
Pinnacle, which is an implementation partner for Thomson Reuters and Intapp, says that the new offering is in response to client demand. “Speaking to our clients about their goals for the next three years, they told us they want to continue capitalising on Microsoft technologies throughout their operation while keeping best-of-breed systems, such as the Intapp platform or Thomson Reuters 3E at the strategic core of their business,” Pinnacle says in an announcement shared with Legal IT Insider ahead of its release.
Most firms started their investment in a Microsoft strategy with Power BI solutions that communicate information to fee-earners, and Pinnacle says that it has delivered over 100 of these projects globally.
The next organic stage of the journey is to create the engine and integrations that allows people across the business to surface complex information within commonly used applications, like Teams, Outlook or PowerApps and take actions based on them, or channel back new points of information into the core systems.
Pinnacle says that the list of possible use cases is endless and configurable around firms’ needs. It could enable anything from approving expenses through a click of a button in Outlook to creating a mailing list of key contacts in your CRM based on billing information from within Teams. Leveraging these capabilities will turn Microsoft into a strategic, fully supported, enterprise-class solution within firms.
Mike Bailey, Pinnacle’s chief strategy officer, said: “We have always worked in close strategic partnerships with our clients and a key part of that approach is to be dynamic in responding to what they need. Our experience with BI, Microsoft and other key law firm solutions gives us a unique opportunity to be able to support them on this journey.”
The announcement is a recognition of the fact that Microsoft, more than ever, is at the centre of law firms’ strategy, and the growing understanding of the extent to which they can use native Microsoft functionality to automate their processes and analyse their performance.