Legal professionals can now calculate and manage court deadlines from within Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s workplace collaboration software, with the release this week by court deadline calculator LawToolBox of its Deadline App for Microsoft Teams.

This new app for Teams builds on the functionality of the company’s app LawToolBox365 Office for Legal, which is an Outlook add-in that integrates with Office 365 to enable legal professionals to manage court deadlines entirely from within Outlook. With the teams app, users can jump back and forth between Teams and Outlook to manage the same matters.

Jack Grow, president of LawToolBox, told me last week that Teams is becoming a popular collaboration tool at larger law firms. Adoption is likely to increase even more following Microsoft’s announcement last week that it now offers a free version of Teams for organizations of up to 300 people.

The Teams app is identical to the Outlook app in its functionality. Members of a team can work in either Outlook or Teams, based on their own preferred workflows. Among the tasks that users can perform within Teams:

  • Calculate litigation and administrative deadlines based on applicable rules.
  • Add, update and remove case-specific deadlines. Update team member Outlook calendars as deadlines and users change.
  • View, email and share deadlines for a matter, user, team or firm-wide.
  • Filter by recent matters, user matters, firm matters, or matter name.
  • View analytics showing average length of matters and motions.
  • Use Microsoft Power BI to analyze relationships with co-workers.
  • Search files in Microsoft SharePoint using key words and phrases.

The app includes the ability to display analytics on both matters and motions. For matters, you can retrieve statistics on the average length of a matter in the venue or ruleset for that matter.

You can see the statistics at three levels: across all of LawToolBox on an anonymized basis, across all matters in your firm, and for any matters that has been shared to you. Motion analytics give you the average length of a motion, from date of filing until the date of the order, in the venue or ruleset for that matter.

For either of these sets of analytics, you can see the statistics at three levels: across all of LawToolBox on an anonymized basis, across all matters in your firm, and for any matters that has been shared to you.

“This integration with Microsoft Teams is a powerful and crucial step in our mission to help good attorneys become great attorneys, and to deliver next-generation deadline management tools for law firms and corporate legal departments,” Grow said in a statement announcing the app.

Read more about it at the LawToolBox website. Information on subscription pricing for the Office 365 edition of LawToolBox can be found here.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.