Making New Connections

30 Sep

In the age of virtual working, ‘digital fatigue’ has never been more of a threat to professional services, and getting the greatest value out of technology systems has never before been more important. Mike Walker, chief technology officer at Peppermint Technology, says law firms should be looking to bring their vital information into a single, connected platform if they want to solve both issues

Published in Briefing 2022

Since the shift to remote working, many businesses have relied on communication tools like Microsoft Teams – now near-ubiquitous – to keep people connected. And many professionals have increasingly used the app as a launch pad for all their working day, transforming them from simple message apps to productivity hubs.

And it’s precisely this growth in utilisation that Mike Walker, chief technology officer at Peppermint Technology, believes vendors should be keeping in mind when designing their future integrations. “To say Teams has ‘revolutionised’ work would be wrong, because we had web-based videoconferencing toolsets, like WebEx, before the pandemic. But most of those systems had no programmatic interface behind them – Teams can orchestrate information from various sources into a new viewpoint that can be brought into the user experience,” he says.

How does this help law firms today? As law firms often have a big hill to climb when it comes to technology adoption, Walker says user experience should be a major consideration for technology development – lending weight to the idea of developing what he calls the “single pane of glass” approach to presenting information. “Lawyers spend about 60% of their day in either Teams or Outlook, with the rest being switching between accounting systems, searching on Google and similar. If they can look at one window and know where they are, they can strip out additional things that aren’t relevant – that’s a far more streamlined experience that avoids context switching,” he explains.

The power of connections

Sensing this need prompted Walker to begin development of a new tool capable of surfacing information within Teams: Peppermint Connect. The solution utilises the capabilities of the Microsoft tech stack, particularly the largely un-leveraged power of Microsoft Graph, and puts important contextual information from Peppermint’s larger toolset into platforms used on a daily basis. “It’s very different from traditional legal vendors, which have their own website or native desktop app and they inject you into Outlook or Teams. We’re the opposite way round – we originate where the lawyer wants to start.”

In practice, that will mean that, by entering an email address into Outlook, for instance, users can summon information on the progress of a given client’s matter. “They not only had no need to go and search Client Manager, they’ve not had to go and do anything else. It’s buttoned directly into the user experience of Outlook or Teams: if they want to go and create a new chat, they can link it to a transaction and see a historical view of business data alongside their Teams chats. That context offers a lot of extra value,” he says.

Microsoft has been definitively moving towards a more “horizontal” approach to its systems in recent years, Walker says – which has implications for both legal vendors and law firms. “Not many tech systems actually leverage the value of firms’ Microsoft 365 licences. Building on those features helps return value on the investment in that package,” he says.

“Lawyers spend about 60% of their day in either Teams or Outlook, with the rest being switching between accounting systems, searching on Google and similar. If they can look at one window and know where they are, they can strip out additional things that aren’t relevant – that’s a far more streamlined experience that avoids context switching”
Mike Walker, chief technology officer, Peppermint Technology

As one example, he cites Outlook’s existing ability to port events and invitations into Teams, and future functionality that will allow users to have personalised apps embedded. But this will be more difficult for some vendors than others: “If they’re not integrated with Microsoft Graph, they’re not ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’. We’ve built Connect with API orchestration and it’s using the power of Graph in the cloud properly – that’s a very big difference in scope, and it’s where Connect adds a ‘legal secret sauce’ – we can add to that ecosystem.”

Don’t fix what’s not broken – build on it

However, Walker says he’s been cautious not to recreate existing functionality in a new tool, or “rebottling everything in a new location”. That’s been a key focus in the creation of Connect, which was initially developed with DWF, in connection with the firm’s own internal, case management-based ‘Project Mario’.

The firm knew it couldn’t realistically keep adding to its technology portfolio, Walker says, so Project Mario focused on extending the reach of useful data, such as financial information, into existing systems. That, eventually, evolved into the “Connect umbrella”, he says, which is focused on facilitating information streams, and eventually gained the name ‘Luigi’ – “Because Mario and Luigi get on quite well,” he laughs.

He adds, on a more serious note, that Luigi became an acronym for ‘Legal User Intelligent Graphical Interface’: “It’s a ‘lawyer toolset’ that provides intelligence about what you’re doing and how you want to do it – those are things lawyers actually value.”

That might manifest as ‘reactive documents’, to-do lists embedded in email, or new versions of ‘document bibles’: “The old-school way of doing that is to create a Word document and hope no one edits it. But you could potentially have live documents that are just lists,” he says.

And, in future, Walker sees a user interface with personalised apps, which could benefit from potential functionalities not yet in the mainstream – and says Peppermint’s Connect will be able to facilitate that vision. “As we build on Connect and learn from the fast-paced evolution of Teams, we could take advantage of ideas that seem gimmicky now, like augmented reality, but which may become de facto in the future. There are clever ideas coming up all the time.”