Speaker 1: Stop being a slave to your desk, stop being a slave to your phone, and work the way that you want to work. Work on your own terms, interact with your data how you want to, throw away all the bells and whistles that you don't want, and just include the things that you need. Foundation. Simplify to amplify. What's up everyone? In today's video, I want to go through the specifics of the Microsoft 365 Case Management System. I want to show it to you in action, a full workflow and things that you would do on a day-to-day basis. You know, it starts with an email, and that email comes to you and it's got some attachments. You have to save those attachments, maybe you've got to diary something, maybe you've got to delegate a task. These are all day-to-day operations that we take on a daily basis as paralegals, as attorneys, and a lot of us don't fit into cookie cutter systems. A lot of us can't pay for those cookie cutter systems. And so for years, I've been developing a system with leveraging the power of Microsoft 365. I've got a masterclass, which is linked below, but in today's video, we're going to go through this entire workflow process so you can see how we can streamline those day-to-day processes, simply leveraging the power of Microsoft. So let's dive into my system and I'll show you exactly how that works. Here we see a standard SharePoint site. This is what is given to us when we create a SharePoint site on the Microsoft 365 platform. On the left-hand column, it gives us conversations, documents, and notebook, but really nothing else. There's no calendar. There's some quick links, some news, document library, but nothing that we could truly use in terms of case management. So we want to transform this SharePoint site into this SharePoint site. And when we do that and we modify this space, we're really customizing the user experience. So going through this, we have an e-distribution list. We have case contacts, a service list, case links, case calendar, recent activity of anything and everything that's been going on in your SharePoint site, documents for document management, as well as your task list. So this is Planner working for you on the homepage of that SharePoint site, just like documents. We've got both of those in the left-hand column. But right here, we can quickly delegate a task to any one of our team members. In addition to that, we have case news. Maybe we want to update our team about settlement negotiations or recent conversation that we had with a client. But going into this left-hand menu here, we have the homepage. We have a calendar. We have email, documents, indexes. This is for general litigation. This is the template that I've prepared right here. And this comes loaded with all of the index that I could possibly need for my case. I've got an index for pleadings, an index for orders, and all I have to do is click new and add a new item. I've got one for written discovery, one for depositions. I've got one for plaintiff's document production, as well as defendant's document production. In addition to that, I've also got an index for records and liens, because you really want to track those liens sometimes when you're working general litigation. And I can click see all and go into any one of these indexes a little bit further. Click new and simply add my record. Going back to the navigation menu, you see here we have notebook, overview, and planner. So in overview here, we're really looking at the overview of what is in planner. Are we turning in tasks late? Are things in progress? Are we on time? Are things looking good in our case and who is doing what? We delegate through planner, but we can take a look at this overview page and find out really what is going on. And we have teams. Now people are loving teams, they're spending a lot of time in teams, and you can live in teams if you want to, because you have the ability to onboard everything from your SharePoint side into your teams group. Right here we have the document library, which is everything that was in that SharePoint site. We can even go back to that SharePoint site if we want to. We have the calendar, we have the planner, and what's great about using planner in teams is the fact that we have multiple views. We can view it in bucket or assigned to or progress, and we don't just have board. We have list, and you can see the bucket is there right there on the right, but you can view your tasks now in list form or in board form. We've also got the notebook as well as the entire homepage for the SharePoint site, so you can navigate really easily right here within teams within your SharePoint site. You don't have to navigate back if you don't want to, and you see here we have the entire page brought in to the teams environment. We've also got an overview and indexes, so we've really brought that entire environment into the teams environment if that's where you choose to live. Going back to the beginning where we've got the general posts, and right here I'm able to have those intra-office communications with my staff or with my team members, and we can have very organized conversations here in this channel, or we can create more channels. Maybe we've got a trial team with only three out of the five team members, but let's head back to that SharePoint site looking here in documents and navigating to the homepage. Now let's take this SharePoint site and look at it as if it were an actual case, and in order to do that, I'm going to put my case information into this SharePoint site just like that. So you see here I've got Carter V. Kirk, I've got a case number, it's in Whoville County with Judge Judy in room 206. In addition to that, I've got an e-distribution list that I can quickly copy and paste into an email and very efficiently serve everyone that I need to. I've got my service list right here that says who represents who and my case contacts, and if I hover over this contact, I've got a lot of information in this contact right here and even icons that allow me to quickly copy that email address, or if I'm using Teams in my voice telephone system, then I can just click on that number and dial Harvey Carter. If Harvey Carter and I exchanged any files and emails, they would be stored here, and in this overview, you notice LinkedIn, so LinkedIn is now owned by Microsoft and it has been incorporated here. You can also send an email right to Harvey from here. So you see there is an enter new contact button that allows us to really guide that user where they need to go to enter those case contacts. Moving on, we have case links and case calendar. We have recent activity and documents, and you see here there's this email that came in, and we probably need to go and take a look at that email. So we're going to go into the group email right here, and I see this email right here at the top. There are two attachments in this email, a motion, a notice of motion, and when it is being presented, next Thursday at 9 a.m. We're going to save this to group library. I can do that one at a time, or I can save all of these to group library, both attachments. Let's click this button right here, get everything into the group library. So I can go over here right in the middle underneath the general litigation, click the ellipses and navigate back to the site right from the dedicated inbox for that SharePoint site. If I scroll down and I look at recent activity, I can even see that two new items were saved. So I'm going to go here into documents, and we have a folder for email attachments. Looky there, both of the email attachments. So I'm going to click these because I need to move them to where they actually need to go into pleadings. So I'm going to click on pleadings. I'm going to go into file stamp pleadings because that's what I got. So let's go back into documents and we're going to navigate into that pleadings folder, go into file stamp pleadings. But before we do notice that I have a link to my index and I've got my caption service list right there so I can just hit the ground running. There we go. That's the motion. That's the notice of motion. So it made that transition from the email very easy. And looking at indexes, I've got a pleadings index here. So I need to go ahead and add a new item and add what I just got. So I just got a motion for extension of time. I'm going to go ahead and enter the date that it came in, the date that it was filed. I'm also going to enter the party who filed the document. And maybe I have some notes on this. Maybe I want to note that it's the first time that they're requesting for an extension. If I wanted to, I could add an attachment, but we're not going to do that here today. Instead, we're just going to save this item. Right there, I have a line item for a pleading that has been indexed. I received it through email. I got it to the document library. I got it into pleadings. I've got the pleading marked there in my index. So I've got a case calendar right here, and maybe I need to calendar something after receiving that motion. In fact, I know I do because the motion was set for hearing. So I need to go ahead and mark this motion down for next Thursday at 9 a.m. Here I've got a new event, and I'm going to go ahead and add all of the information about this event and invite the SharePoint site. Invite my team members so everybody stays in the know. Now I've got everything right here in that event. If I wanted to attach something, I could, but I really don't need to. So I can go ahead and click send. Navigating back to the homepage of the SharePoint site, you see right here in the calendar, scrolling down, we've got defendant's motion for extension of time right here. Everybody stays in the know. It's on my calendar. It's on their calendar. It's on the SharePoint calendar. And that's part of having this really awesome collaborative space. So in addition to that motion, maybe I need to file a response. So I'm going to delegate a task right here in planner showing on my homepage. So I'm going to enter the title of my SharePoint site, get in the item that I need to do, set a due date, assign myself to it because I'm the one that's going to be preparing this motion, but I just need it on my to-do list. So I want to add that task, and there I go. I now have something tangible that says I need to get a response done. It's right there on that homepage for all of my team members to see. I can even onboard this planner to my Outlook calendar if I wanted to. So you see here, we have that event that has come through to the general litigation dedicated inbox. Now right here, I have an email that didn't land into that dedicated inbox right away. So I need to forward it to that SharePoint site. Or I could reply to this person and BCC the general litigation or my SharePoint site, and it will get filed away. This communication and the file attachment will get filed away in that dedicated inbox. And as a byproduct of that, if they are following that SharePoint site in their inbox, they will receive a copy of this email in their inbox as well. Right there, it came through to the dedicated inbox, so it's digitally filed away right there. And now that it's in this dedicated inbox, we can click here, we can save to group library, and we know what it does from here. It goes right into that email attachment folder, and we can move it from email attachment into research, because that's where this is going to go. That's what Winston wants us to do is save it into research. But let's go back to Planner for a minute, because he also wanted us to make this telephone call. He also wanted us to schedule this telephone call. So let's schedule this telephone call, set a due date, and because I don't have Winston in here, I do need to assign this to myself. And there you go. So we see if we navigate to the homepage of the SharePoint site, that telephone call, that task is sitting right there on our homepage that we need to schedule that telephone call with the client. So I'm going to navigate up here, I'm going to enter a new event to schedule that telephone call. I've already called the client, he told me when he was available, so I'm just going to go ahead and get it in here in the calendar. So I've got all of my information right here in the event. Winston knows he has a telephone call with Harvey. So I'm going to click Send and bring that item into the SharePoint site and into our calendars and there we see that telephone call right there. So by optimizing this event for Winston, I want to bring it into the notebook, that dedicated notebook that is in the SharePoint site. In order to do that, I'm going to go into the event that is in my calendar. Right up here, I have a notebook icon. I want to click on that icon and choose the notebook that it should go into. Now of course, we're going to choose this Carter notebook. Once you've got it into the notebook, you can go ahead and click Open in Notebook. Now this is really cool because it brings all of that information right into your notebook. and what time it's supposed to go and you're ready to hit the ground running. Now something else to note in this is that we see here the meeting date and time. So we know that the time for this meeting is supposed to start at 1 p.m., but what if we're billing by the hour? Maybe we want to note the time that this telephone call ended. So, right after you're done, go ahead and note when the meeting ended and it makes it very easy to track your time when it's billable. Navigating back to the homepage of the SharePoint site, which we can easily do right here. Now that I went ahead and scheduled that telephone call, I can actually mark that task complete. But I forgot about the research that I just saved. So I'm going to go ahead and go into that document library. Click on that research and we're going to move it out of email attachment into the research folder, move here, and voila, it will be there waiting for us. And we can search this entire library, which you can see right there up top. We can also sync this document library to our local machine, map it to our file explorer, and navigate to our document library as if it were part of an internal server. So since we scheduled that call just like Winston wanted us to, we need to navigate down to the planner section right on our homepage and mark that task complete. We'll click the bubble next to the task. It marks it complete. If I bring out show everything that's completed, you'll see it completed right here. Now let's head over into the overview and check out what that looks like. So you see here we have one task left. This is what we've completed. This is what we've done. Everything is going according to plan. And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, is your normal workflow process. We received an email, we saved it, we saved the file attachments, we marked something in our calendar, we gave a couple of tasks, we marked in our calendar again, we completed one of those tasks, and everybody was in the know. So you see this process is quite easy leveraging the power of Microsoft 365. At the root of anything that we manage in our cases, we need everything that is foundation. We need email management. We need calendar management, contacts management, document management. We need team task delegation. We need individual task management. We need all of these things to be able to function on a day-to-day basis. We need to be able to interact with our data and interact with our team members on our own terms. And unfortunately, a lot of the systems out there just don't allow you to do that. They don't allow you to access your data on multiple devices. They don't allow you to access your data on the cloud, and if they do, it's a singular access point. So if that access fails, then you lose your data. So if we actually take a step back and look at the root of case management and what we actually need foundationally to function, Microsoft 365 gives us everything that we could possibly need, and then some. But in my master class, I go through all of those processes, and I teach you how to use those separate applications in Microsoft 365 and execute them in terms of case management. I have spent over 23 years in the legal industry, and many of those years I've spent as a litigation paralegal. I understand the volume of data that goes through our cases and the need to manage them now on a digital level. So it is actually one of your own that has created this system. I have tested this system for four years. I beta tested this system for another year, and I've been doing the master class now for a little bit under a year. It has worked amazingly, and we have hundreds of students all over the world who are benefiting from using this system. And last week I released a video showing how we saved a law firm well over $10,000 annually in case and practice management systems cost simply because they started using this system. They stopped using systems like Smokeball and Clio and Practice Panther because they didn't fit into those cookie cutter systems. And if you don't fit into those cookie cutter systems, then try the Microsoft 365 case management system. Give yourself the ability to customize your workspace. Give yourself the gift of efficiency and productivity. Stop being a slave to your desk. Stop being a slave to your phone and work the way that you want to work. Work on your own terms, interact with your data how you want to, throw away all the bells and whistles that you don't want, and just include the things that you need. Foundation. Simplify to amplify with Microsoft 365. Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com