If you work in the legal sector the term ‘matter’ will be something you are likely to hear daily. However, for those of you not familiar with the term, here is a brief overview. A matter, in terms of document management, is a place where documents related to legal work are kept.
Historically, the way in which matter information has been stored has varied, but a typical example is to create folders for each client, sub-folders for each geographical region and sub-folders for each matter. The matter then requires sub-folders, such as contracts etc. This hierarchy works if done consistently but over years, with users joining and leaving, the once was well-defined structure becomes inconsistent.
There are several industry tools that allow matter users to store files in a structured way, but none as flexible as SharePoint Online. SharePoint Online is generally used for document management, with some organisations looking at migrating their legacy legal systems to Azure (PaaS).
Security and Information Barriers
In the legal world, as with any organisation, security is of utmost importance. In Europe, the introduction of GDPR in May 2018 meant that information management and security became a hot topic, and it still is. Security permissions in SharePoint Online are not covered in this article, Microsoft has several good resources that cover this; however, we will discuss Information Barriers in Teams.
Information Barriers in Teams are policies that administrators can configure to prevent individuals or groups from communicating with each other. In the legal world, you may have a team working for two different clients that do business in the same industry. In this case, the team members would potentially be accessing Teams they shouldn’t. With Information Barriers in Teams, it is possible to prevent this.
Provisioning
Provisioning a Site Collection for a matter repository in SharePoint Online could be done manually. But doing so when you want customisations could lead to inconsistencies and security breaches. Using PnP (https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP) helps solve this, but only so far.
Provisioning tools can be used to provision SharePoint Site Collections and, if required, an associated Microsoft Team. The advantages of this is consistently provisioned Site Collections (this can include Document Libraries, Templates and Metadata) with Microsoft Teams that can have Information Barriers applied.