Article

Microsoft Teams for Lawyers

October 22, 2021

Background

Thrust into the Work-From-Home (often seen online as WFH) environment, many lawyers scrambled to learn the technologies that would allow them to continue their practice of law during the pandemic. Finding solutions that would allow lawyers to continue to take client meetings, albeit virtually, became a priority. The pandemic way of life was new to all businesses – law firms included – having the ability to continue to interact with clients was a must.

From the outset, Zoom dominated the video conferencing market. Over the past year, Zoom has grown in popularity and usage. According to Zoom, there are over 300 million daily participants – up from just 10 million at the start of 2020. As popular as Zoom is, that doesn’t mean it’s the only possible solution for your firm. There are other video conferencing providers to evaluate, including one that you may already be paying for – Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams is a communication and collaboration platform developed by Microsoft and is part of the Microsoft 365 subscription service offering. Teams is often thought of as a competitor to Slack, offering workspace chat rooms, video conferencing, and file storage/sharing. Microsoft Teams is much more than a Slack alternative and replaced Skype for Business, which has been retired.

There is a free version of Teams for users who don’t already have a Microsoft 365 subscription, but it comes with some usage limitations such as a participant capacity of up to 100 users and a maximum meeting length of 60 minutes. These limitations don’t exist with the Business Basic, Business Standard, or E3 subscription levels.

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