SharePoint for legal document management: a pragmatic choice – but is it the best?

For many law firms, SharePoint Online is the go-to platform for storing, organising, and sharing legal documents and legal entity information.

Its integration within the default IT architecture of many companies makes it a pragmatic choice for finance and legal professionals. However, is this really the best approach?

Legal document management requires enhanced levels of security, access and compliance. Corporify dives deeper into the core functionalities of SharePoint and sees where it may fall short.

How to use SharePoint for document management

Many finance and legal teams rely on SharePoint Online for legal document management, including governing essential information on companies, directors and shareholders.

While SharePoint is widely used as a document management system within Microsoft 365, it’s crucial to evaluate whether its core functionalities – storing, organising and sharing – truly meet the specialised needs of legal document management. Let’s delve into these features!

#1 Storing primarily entity information

The main feature SharePoint is known for? Providing storage for numerous documents. This centralised hub is widely recognised as a reliable place for teams to store and access important files.

Thanks to its document libraries and document management capabilities, all your legal documents such as share registers, board invitation letters and dividend distribution notices, are kept in one location where legal departments can maintain easy access to all relevant documents.

Storage place without further in-depth analysis

However, SharePoint sites lack the functionality needed for deeper analysis of legal matters. It doesn't allow users to create visual representations of entity structures or facilitate smooth collaboration for more complex entity management tasks.

This limits its effectiveness for legal teams who need to track, manage and collaborate on entity data beyond simple document storage.

#2 Organising legal documents

To effectively organise your legal files in SharePoint, you can establish folder structures and adopt naming conventions.

This can help maintain order across document libraries and records when storing critical data about directorships, shares and ownership details in one central location.

Lack of ease-of-use

Despite this offered feature, creating an effective SharePoint site for managing legal document libraries is a time-consuming and complex process.

For many in the legal industry, the platform’s user experience lacks intuitiveness, making it challenging for users to navigate without training sessions or extensive guidance from IT colleagues, often leading to inefficiency and frustration.

#3 Sharing entity data across the organisation

Thanks to its strong collaboration features, a SharePoint site allows legal departments to share various files like documents, spreadsheets and presentations, across shared document libraries.

This broad access supports teamwork by empowering colleagues to work from the same existing legal documents in real-time.

Loss of overview

Unfortunately, customising document sharing to meet specific needs is labour-intensive. For instance, tailoring files for different stakeholders, such as the CFO or external auditors, often requires creating separate folders, duplicating documents and manual sharing tasks.

This approach makes it challenging to track which sensitive client information has been shared with whom, complicating oversight and document control.

The limitations of SharePoint for legal and finance teams

#1. Missing crucial features

Although useful for general document storage, SharePoint Online lacks several essential features for effective legal document management.

This Microsoft 365 software does not specifically address the complex requirements of managing sensitive legal documents, like shareholder data, ownership information or voting percentages. Not being able to create structured charts based on the share registers is another problem.

Furthermore, SharePoint falls short in linking data to prevent duplication and offering customisable reporting options.

Finally, it lacks integration with official sources, such as commercial registers, which is crucial for keeping legal matter records up to date.

For legal departments, these limitations make SharePoint a less-than-ideal choice for corporate legal document management and compliance needs.

#2. A hidden high user cost

Using SharePoint as a document library for managing legal entities is way more expensive than the standard subscription fee.

Customising SharePoint to meet the specific needs of legal document management often becomes complex and costly, as this customisation process typically involves extensive development, testing, adjustments and ongoing maintenance.

On top of that, software changes over time, causing regular update requirements. Together with the cost of meetings and consultations with in-house IT or external consultants, this once one-time project quickly turns into a continuous effort, adding costs each time changes are needed.

Over time, these hidden costs add up significantly, making SharePoint document management a more expensive option than it initially appears.

#3. Fragmented workflow processes

The versatility and complexity of SharePoint create significant usability challenges for finance and legal teams when managing legal matter data.

For example, to update your shareholder information, this Microsoft Office tool requires users to manually extract the data, verify it, record changes, update related documents such as the entity chart, and then upload everything again.

This lack of workflow automation is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, as working with SharePoint involves working across multiple document sets and systems.

Furthermore, this lack of functionality can hinder a law firm’s ability to ensure compliance and meet regulatory standards for data protection.

As a result, managing and updating legal entity data in SharePoint quickly becomes cumbersome, leading to inefficiencies and increased risk.

#4. Lack of analytical capabilities

SharePoint lacks the ability to perform a thorough assessment of data. When you upload documents, they remain static in the document library.

In the context of managing legal entity data, this means that while you can store important information in document sets, you cannot perform any real-time updates, track changes effectively, or analyse the data meaningfully.

Because of this static nature, extracting insights or viewing complex data relationships is impossible within SharePoint, leaving users with a system that only offers basic document storage rather than a comprehensive, dynamic platform for managing legal matters.

In short, without the ability to manipulate and analyse stored data, SharePoint’s usefulness for tasks that require deeper insights and detailed, data-driven decision-making, is highly limited. Unable to analyse and track documents simultaneously leaves this Microsoft Office tool.

#5 Inefficient e-signing

Smoothly e-signing a document within SharePoint Microsoft presents significant challenges. Although it's possible to integrate SharePoint with widely used e-signing platforms like DocuSign, the process remains far from seamless.

A legal team must manually enter the names and email addresses of all signers, a task that is not only tedious but also prone to human error.

Additionally, the process involves dragging and dropping signature fields onto the document, which can be time-consuming and frustrating.

This cumbersome workflow detracts from efficiency and can lead to delays, making the entire process less reliable and increasing the risk of mistakes.

#6 Insufficient user rights and permissions

Ensuring that appropriate team members have access to crucial legal matter data is vital for effective collaboration and decision-making.

While SharePoint offers security features for legal document management, its rigid access controls often limit who can view or edit sensitive client information.

This limitation can hinder efficient document creation and sharing across the organisation, as different teams may struggle to access the data they need.

For instance, your CFO might need to review a share transfer, your CEO might want to check the appointed directors, and some audit firm might require a document set for due diligence.

SharePoint's lack of advanced permissions management and robust security features can slow down the process, impeding collaboration and delaying decision-making within the organisation.

Corporify: an alternative for managing legal entities

ESharePoint legal document management has limitations and risks, making it unsuitable as a dedicated legal entity management tool.

At Corporify, we understand that a law firm needs a reliable legal document management system which reduces the workload, eliminates the likelihood of risks and boosts the productivity of corporate legal departments.

Therefore, we developed a powerful and user-friendly alternative: it’s data-driven, secure, cost-effective, and includes many valuable features and workflow automation. Let’s explore!

5 reasons to use a well-designed legal document management system

#1 Integrated legal expertise

Corporify provides a robust framework designed to integrate legal rules and compliance requirements directly into its system, ensuring that legal teams can manage their tasks fully aligned with relevant legal regulations.

This structured approach significantly reduces the risk of errors, guaranteeing compliance at every step of the process.

Extensive legal knowledge

By embedding comprehensive legal knowledge into its legal document management system, Corporify ensures that users are guided through jurisdiction-specific actions, offering automatic prompts based on the legal context of each task.

This reduces the likelihood of oversight, as the system helps legal professionals take the necessary actions tailored to each jurisdiction’s requirements.

Instant compliance monitoring

Additionally, Corporify's real-time compliance checks offer constant oversight as users input data or perform actions.

Through intuitive reminders and alerts, the system prevents inadvertent errors and ensures that critical legal requirements are always met. Thanks to this essential feature, regulations within the legal industry are never overlooked.

Standardisation of processes

Always wanted to automate repetitive tasks? Corporify’s standardised workflow automation aligns with various legal frameworks, streamlining administrative tasks and eliminating the risks associated with inconsistencies.

This ensures smooth and error-free processes for managing legal information.

#2 Cost-effective solution

Corporify is a dedicated point solution designed specifically for legal document management, which means there’s no need for complex customisation.

All the essential features are built-in, providing a cost-effective alternative to platforms like SharePoint, which often require costly and time-consuming modifications before they can be fully functional.

Moreover, as a fast-evolving SaaS platform, Corporify continuously improves its capabilities with regular updates and new features.

This ensures that users receive significant value over time without the additional costs typically associated with software maintenance and customisation within a SharePoint site.

Efficient e-Signing

Take the e-signing challenge, for example. With Corporify, fields are automatically populated, eliminating the need for manual data entry.

This streamlined process makes e-signing fast, efficient, and hassle-free, ensuring that legal documents are signed quickly and accurately without unnecessary delays.

#3. Smooth legal matter updates

Corporify is designed with user-friendliness at its core, simplifying document management processes within one single, unified and robust platform.

Unlike SharePoint sites, where multiple tools and manual steps are required, Corporify simplifies tasks by integrating everything you need into one seamless workflow.

For example, updating shareholder information in one of your existing documents becomes a straightforward process with Corporify’s dedicated flow for share transfer registrations. This process is automated and intuitive, reducing the time and effort needed.

Abandoning multiple steps

By eliminating all the required steps of Microsoft SharePoint (extracting, verifying, updating, re-uploading), Corporify ensures that all information is consistently updated in real-time, making the process faster, smoother, and more efficient.

Integrating tasks into one easy-to-use tool reduces the risk of mistakes and significantly lowers administrative hassle in legal practice.

#4. In-depth analysis and versioning control

To help finance and legal teams keep ahead in a fast-evolving landscape, Corporify processes dynamic, real-time data. By doing so, the system provides the insights needed to make informed, up-to-date decisions and supports active collaboration.

Users gain access to in-depth analysis, trend visualisation and predictive capabilities. These features help them to identify valuable connections in their data and empower them with real-time, dynamic data processing.

Version tracking

A core strength of Corporify is its robust version control system, which offers the possibility to track every data change. This feature logs detailed records of each modification, providing a complete history of edits and ensuring data integrity.

Users can even revert to previous document revisions if necessary, which not only protects data accuracy but also builds accountability across teams, supporting a transparent and secure environment for legal document management.

#5. Granular permission rights

In a law firm, proper access controls to sensitive information are key. Corporify is purpose-built to handle the complexities of legal document management and legal practices, offering precise control over user permissions and secure access to critical data.

Administrators can define granular permission rights for each user, not only to access documents but also to use specific legal functionalities.

This advanced level of access control ensures that sensitive client documents are fully safeguarded while allowing for tailored access across the organisation. Users have peace of mind knowing their legal data is protected, while collaboration remains smooth and accessible to those who need it.

Data room

In addition, Corporify provides a secure, user-friendly data room, specifically designed for effective collaboration. Stakeholders can access and work on shared legal files within a structured, visually intuitive interface, enhancing both transparency and efficiency.

The data room promotes streamlined communication across teams and with external partners, while providing enhanced security for confidential legal documents.