• Stuart Fuller, Leadership |

KPMG is joining forces with Microsoft, Intapp and other technology innovators to create an ecosystem for building integrated solutions that can empower the legal departments and law firms of the future.

Like many other industries and organizations, legal departments and law firms had never experienced change as quickly as they did during the pandemic. Suddenly, legal professionals faced the need to support a slew of new business requirements — to digitize operations, enable hybrid working, counter increased cyber risks, and support a broadening spectrum of regulatory, compliance and risk issues, to name a few.

At the same time, the shift to remote working proved the value of digital solutions to the legal services market. From virtual collaboration and contract management to data analytics and beyond, technology helped many legal departments stay on track and continue to support their organizations in a chaotic environment.

Many legal firms and departments moved to the cloud rapidly, taking full advantage of the unparalleled opportunity to evolve their functions and transform their service delivery. The shift has empowered them to make greater impact for their organizations by striving to reduce costs, increase their involvement and visibility in the business, harness data and its predictive capabilities to make better decisions, enhance risk and governance processes, and improve efficiency.

That’s why KPMG Global Legal Services is building an ecosystem of alliances with some of the world’s leading technology, data and services companies. The goal is to build integrated, broad-ranging offerings for legal departments and law firms that can help set the foundation for success in many corners of the market in the years to come.

By extending the longstanding global alliance with Microsoft into the legal industry, KPMG firms can offer tailored digital solutions and services based on Microsoft cloud technologies. Deep integration with Microsoft 365 and Teams will help create the backbone of the cloud-based desktop for the future. Built on Azure, solutions can expect to benefit from Microsoft’s trusted and secure cloud environments to enable the legal industry to bring advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) functionalities into their day-to-day operations. 


Microsoft is in a strong position to enable legal professionals and knowledge workers. Our products are the industry’s tools of the trade, and Microsoft is how the work gets done. We recognize that legal professionals have unique needs. That's why we choose to leverage the market expertise of strategic partners like KPMG, in addition to the breadth and depth of our partner ecosystem and innovative ISVs to deliver solutions to the legal industry.

Fari Breguet
General Manager, U.S. Industry Team, Microsoft


In addition to Microsoft, Intapp will also join the KPMG alliance ecosystem for law. With 20 years in the legal industry, Intapp is a market leader that delivers the industry cloud for professional services based on Microsoft cloud technologies, including leading solutions for law firms and corporate legal teams to extend Teams and SharePoint for better collaboration, matter management, and document management. Intapp’s industry-specific data model and technologies can extend the capabilities that Microsoft and KPMG firms offer in ways that support the specialized operating model, data requirements, security, and other elements of legal departments and law firms.


Our strategic alliance with KPMG brings together their expertise and best practices with Intapp's industry-specific capabilities to accelerate and scale digital transformation for professional services and capital markets industries.

We are pleased to expand our collaboration and join KPMG's global alliance ecosystem for law, together with Microsoft, establishing a powerful combination of market leaders. Together, we offer joint customers trusted solutions to allow them to thrive and deliver value for their clients.

John Hall
Chairman and CEO, Intapp


This is just the beginning. KPMG firms will continue including organizations in this ecosystem that have the know-how and insights to identify solutions for the legal services industry’s unique needs. This can unite the complementary capabilities of each organization into a powerful platform for delivering legal services and managing operations: the ultimate one-stop shop for law firms and legal departments.

The KPMG Global Legal Services network has a rich understanding of the legal industry and deep knowledge that has been gained by:

  • helping clients redesign and transform their legal operations to:
    • accommodate rapidly growing, increasingly diverse legal services teams
    • effectively deploy technology-enabled solutions
    • help ensure effective legal change management within legal departments and law firms
       
  • leading transformations for and sharing leading practices among the law firms associated with KPMG firms and the KPMG Global Legal Services network, many of which face the same opportunities and challenges as other legal providers

  • advising the growing range of external legal services providers, from global networks to boutiques specializing in technology implementation, contract management and legal managed services.

Whether an organization and its legal team is seeking solutions to manage its global entities, undertake business reorganizations or implement strategic mergers and acquisitions, technology and data are increasingly important. The integration of various solutions can take the ease and efficiency of legal departments and law firms to new heights.

Imagine the possibilities when:

  • applications like Teams and Excel can interact seamlessly with AI and analytics-powered time, billing and document management systems
  • dashboards can open visibility over, for example, an organization’s entire legal operations and relationships, creating opportunities to mine data and deliver operational insights back to the organization
  • data for budgets, regulatory filings and other reporting can be retrieved, scrubbed and packaged in the right format within seconds
  • artificial intelligence can work with user data, reporting and accounts receivable systems to optimize contractual terms, monitor compliance and drive better business outcomes.

As you can see, this is not about stitching together discrete pieces of software. It’s about redesigning legal services from the ground up. The ecosystem KPMG firms are creating aims to open doors for legal departments and law firms to make the most of the applications and platforms they already have and to create new digital solutions to solve specific business problems.

I believe this marks the start of a profound shift in the way legal operations are run and structured. I’m excited to see what new capabilities emerge as this ecosystem evolves and more strategic alliances come onstream.

The views and opinions of external contributors expressed herein are those of the interviewees and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of KPMG International Limited or any KPMG member firm.