In the early days of the computer revolution, the big hardware manufacturers thought they’d just kicked off an intense battle for market dominance. Instead, what Microsoft figured out was that the computer on the desk doesn’t matter as much as the programs making the computer run. Decades later, Microsoft has a stranglehold on the business world.
When LawToolBox began in legal calendaring, its founders bet on Microsoft, forging a partnership to enrich its applications for legal industry use. Which has paid off for the company as it’s grown from calendaring to function as an AI-enabled umbrella platform within Microsoft365 — embedded more than integrated into Microsoft — living in the DMS, Outlook, Teams, and everything else. Changes or updates populate across a firm’s ecosystem, meaning a lawyer can adjust a deadline in Outlook, and that update will reflect across all relevant matter files, calendars, and documents in real time. An incredibly useful product, but it remained hard to succinctly explain the extent of LawToolBox’s role within the system without resorting to incomplete descriptions like “Microsoft’s legal helper.”
But Microsoft’s CoPilot branding unintentionally provides a better way to describe how LawToolBox fits into a Microsoft-based environment. The company uses the phrase “CoPilot for Legal” but after reviewing what they’re doing, it’s more like “CoPilot’s CoPilot” for this industry. Either way, it’s a much more straightforward description that can resonate across the industry and with clients.
The first legal app approved for Microsoft CoPilot back in December 2023, LawToolBox offers a lot of enhancements to the out-of-the-box AI offering. “Our ability to access a wide range of pre-built and customizable Al models and built and customizable Al models and easy-to-use APIs through Azure OpenAl
helps our solution maintain the optimal level of intelligence to recognize matter-specific dates and other types of content, even from handwritten notes,” COO Carol-Lynn Grow notes. There’s also a legal prompt library providing pre-configured prompts for routine tasks and an option for firms to design customized workflows for complex matters.
Every time Microsoft makes copilot show up in new places — like Excel or PowerPoint — LawToolBox is along for the ride and automatically shows up in those places too.
And outside of CoPilot proper, LawToolBox developed its own “LawToolBox AI,” offering many of the same capabilities as Microsoft’s Copilot – reading PDFs, scanning handwritten documents, and organizing data – without the CoPilot price tag. “Microsoft suggested we build this,” Grow said. “It’s still on their platform, and they’re excited about making AI accessible at every level.”
And securely accessible at every level, leveraging all the security that Microsoft offers including the MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment), while providing quick access to documents, deadlines, and co-authoring capabilities in Word, with everything tied back to a case or client matter with its Matter Container concept for organizing legal matters within the Microsoft ecosystem.
“The best story that we have to tell about the way attorneys’ lives are changed, is that an attorney is at a soccer game and they’ve got an M&A deal and they’re like, oh shoot, that’s tomorrow in the Outlook calendar entry, they just click on the documents link and it has all their documents and everything’s secure and right there on their iPhone.”
As Microsoft continues to evolve, so does LawToolBox. At this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote highlighted LawToolBox as a prime example of a partner using Copilot to bring AI into specialized industries. It’s a recognition not just of LawToolBox’s technical prowess but of the vision that has carried them from 1998 to today.
And a reflection of Microsoft’s vision dating back to the early 80s. What matters is the software that makes the system go. LawToolBox operates as a secure bridge between Microsoft’s applications and legal-specific needs. Empowering law firms to use familiar tools like NetDocuments and SharePoint while providing AI capabilities required to compete in this AI moment. When it comes to CoPilot, LawToolBox has embraced the task of making it work for lawyers.
Because even CoPilots need CoPilots sometimes.
