When SharePoint is the enterprise system of record, in-house legal teams face a genuine operational tension. They are expected to work within the tools the business has standardised on, while also maintaining legal-grade controls: privilege, confidentiality, consistent structure, and the ability to retrieve information quickly when it counts.
In practice, that tension produces ongoing administration. Someone has to enforce folder structures, chase colleagues to file emails correctly, maintain access groups, correct mistakes, and retrofit metadata so that search and compliance requests do not become a scramble. As Steven Dudley put it during Lawcadia’s recent webinar, lawyers rely on Microsoft tools every day, but “what they really find challenging is to have that single source of truth, where everything can be brought together.”
When SharePoint Creates an Admin Overhead for Legal
SharePoint is a capable enterprise repository. The gap is that it is not designed to run a matter as a governed unit of work, and that gap shows up in three consistent ways.
Matter context fragments. Documents may be in SharePoint, advice sits in email threads, key decisions are recorded in chat, and resourcing information is held somewhere else entirely. Without a central matter record, teams struggle to demonstrate the value of their work and to plan capacity effectively.
Workflows become fragile. Many teams attempt to build processes using tools such as Power Automate. Steven highlighted the maintenance risk directly: “Who’s going to maintain it? If someone moves on, who’s now in charge of that? And often IT don’t particularly want to get involved in that sort of stuff.” The administration burden grows quietly over time, until something breaks.
Metadata and search depend on people doing the right thing. SharePoint supports metadata tagging, but as Steven noted: “Trying to get in-house teams to do that is very difficult.” The result is predictable: inconsistent tagging, weaker search, and more time spent hunting for documents at exactly the moment they are needed most.
Alongside these operational pressures, legal teams must also maintain privilege and confidentiality. Manual access control is possible, but it is error-prone and difficult to audit at scale.
Where Legacy Integrations Make Things Worse
A common response is to connect a matter management tool to SharePoint. Older integrations, however, introduce two problems of their own.
Version confusion. Legacy integrations often rely on two-way file synchronisation. For legal teams, this is where reliability breaks down. Steven noted that two-way sync “potentially has a four to five minute gap in between synchronisations”, which creates competing versions and genuine uncertainty about which file is current.
Permission drift. Where permissions are managed in two systems simultaneously, they fall out of alignment. Even correctly set folder-level permissions can be overridden at a higher level by SharePoint site owners. Steven’s warning was direct: “even if you’ve got the best permissions that you set on that folder level, they can come and override that.” For legal, that is not an acceptable risk.
Both issues create more administration and increase governance exposure.
Best Practice: Matter Management as the System of Control
SharePoint can remain the system of record for documents. The matter management platform, however, must act as the system of control. In practical terms, best practice means addressing four things:
Real-time permission synchronisation. When a matter becomes confidential, access needs to change immediately. Steven described this as the “number one question” from IT: immediate synchronisation between the matter management system and SharePoint, with no lag.
Control that overrides unsafe changes. Where site-level access could undermine the legal confidentiality model, the matter system must be able to detect and correct that, not rely on someone noticing after the fact.
Standardised folder structures by matter type. Litigation, M&A, and investigations produce different patterns of content. Consistent structure, applied at the point of matter creation, reduces clean-up later and supports both search and e-discovery.
Automated filing and metadata capture. Rather than depending on lawyers to complete manual filing steps, the goal is what Steven called “compliance by stealth”: automated routing of documents and emails, with enriched metadata, into the right place within the matter structure.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In the webinar demonstration, Steven showed a workflow in which creating a matter in Lawcadia automatically creates a corresponding SharePoint parent folder and configurable subfolders, covering intake documents, emails, invoices, and working documents. Structure is applied consistently from the outset, without depending on individual habits or discipline.
For day-to-day collaboration, the approach is built around avoiding a parallel document universe. Documents open directly in Word (online or desktop) and save live to SharePoint, so version history is managed in one place. There is no two-way synchronisation to introduce the risks described above.
For search, the demonstration showed the ability to run a search across SharePoint subfolders and surface results alongside matter context within Lawcadia’s advanced search, rather than requiring users to switch between systems.
For email capture, emails saved via the Outlook add-in are synchronised into the relevant SharePoint folder, with content that is searchable and accessible to those with the appropriate matter access.
For permissions, Lawcadia provides visible indicators that a matter folder in SharePoint is under active governance, including instant access restrictions when a matter is marked confidential, and automatic reversal of unauthorised changes.
A final point matters for adoption: teams can continue working in SharePoint when they prefer to. As Sacha noted during the webinar, colleagues can drag and drop documents into the SharePoint folder, and they will appear automatically in Lawcadia. Steven described this as “a link-first approach as opposed to a file-first approach”, which also supports very large files without friction.
Key Takeaway
If SharePoint is mandated across your organisation, the goal is to use it to your advantage by building on its collaboration strengths, while using matter management to enforce real-time permissions, consistent folder structures, email capture, and searchable metadata across every matter. Collaboration and control are not in opposition. With the right approach, they work together.
Missed the webinar? Watch the recording here.