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Covid-19 has driven an unprecedented change in working habits. After an initial scramble to prepare for mass working from home, remote working has become routine for many large law firms, and it is expected to last long after the relaxation of social distancing rules. By and large, firms have adapted well, maintaining client engagement and service delivery, and technology has played a major part in this. According to a global study by McKinsey, the digitisation of customer and supplier interactions has been accelerated by three to four years as a result of the pandemic. This research by Briefing considers the recent impact that technology has had on communication and collaboration in the legal sector.
One tool that has seen a rapid increase in adoption during lockdown is Microsoft Teams. This research shows that Microsoft’s cloud-based unified communications platform has become the preferred solution for internal collaboration at more than half of the law firms surveyed. And this figure is expected to increase further – in October 2020 Microsoft announced 115 million daily active users on Teams, an increase of 53% in just six months.
But while cloud-based platforms have become the norm for internal collaboration at law firms, the picture for business telephony is more mixed. Obviously, phones are still being answered during lockdown – 85% of firms said that core business telephony challenges were limited or non-existent. But the way that firms responded to lockdown varied – while 42% already had a cloud-based telephony solution that allowed users to access their business line over the internet, others had to resort to forwarding their work phone to a mobile or home phone. This means that basic telephony features like transferring calls to colleagues were not available.
Lockdown has almost certainly accelerated the adoption of cloud-based telephony solutions. At the time this research was conducted in October 2020, most firms that still used on-premises business telephony solutions had selected a vendor to move their telephony into the cloud or were actively considering doing so. Just 11% of firms had no plan to move their business telephony into the cloud. Firms that have already moved to cloud-based telephony reported that it makes it easier for employees to work from any location (70%), as well as offering new user functionality, easier user management, and reduced telecoms costs.
Of those firms that already have a cloud-based telephony solution in place, more than half have selected Microsoft’s Teams-based solution. For users, Teams telephony means that internal and external communication – phone calls, instant messaging, videoconferencing and file sharing – is all integrated into a single interface. IT teams only have to deploy and maintain a single unified communications platform with a single licence, and benefit from the reliability and security of Microsoft’s Azure global network.
As a result of the radical change in working habits driven by the pandemic in 2020, cloud-based communications platforms have come of age. They are now an essential tool for major law firms to maintain client engagement and service delivery with a remote workforce. LoopUp – a certified Microsoft Gold Partner – provides voice solutions to more than 5,000 organisations around the world, including 20 of the top 100 global law firms. We offer cloud-based telephony for Microsoft Teams as a fully managed service – from solution design and deployment to service delivery and support.
Read the full report here.
