Three takeaways from the Virginia State Bar TECHSHOW

On April 28th, 2025, I co-presented a session on Microsoft 365 for Lawyers with Chris Fortier at the Virginia State Bar TECHSHOW. I’ve had a few people ask follow-up questions, or if I could give a quick summary for folks who weren’t able to attend. So here are three quick takeaways that you’ll hopefully find helpful.

There are a lot of different choices when it comes to subscribing to Microsoft 365. Some solo/small firms may opt for a Personal or Family subscription, but that’s a mistake. You save a few dollars per month, but you also miss out on a lot of key functionality.

One of the key features for any professional business is having a professional email capability. Running your firm with a free Outlook.com or Gmail.com email address, for example (I won’t even get into AOL), can send a signal that your firm isn’t very serious. It’s easy and inexpensive to have a custom domain name (yourfirm.com) and a Microsoft 365 business subscription gives you Exchange server, which lets you set up professional mailboxes for yourfirm.com.

Microsoft 365 Business Standard is the best choice for most solo, small, or mid-sized firms. You get all of the Microsoft 365 apps like Word and PowerPoint (for Windows, Mac, mobile, or web), 1 terabyte of OneDrive storage per user, Teams, email, SharePoint and more.

Microsoft 365 Business Premium offers everything Standard does plus it adds advanced security features like Microsoft Defender for Business and Intune for device management.

Most firms that are using Microsoft 365 don’t realize all of the things they get with their subscription. In addition to the Microsoft 365 apps like Word or Excel, and Teams, and OneDrive, you also get a number of other services that can help your practice already included in your subscription. Notable examples are:

• Microsoft Bookings - Let clients or prospective clients book time on your calendar when you’re available. Bookings let’s you specify when you want to be available and creates a webpage you can share that lets people choose times you’re available to book an appointment with you.

• Microsoft Forms - Create forms for client intake, feedback, or even to automate routine information requests as part of matters or practice management. The forms are available on the web and you can look at the data in Excel if you want to.

• Microsoft Planner - Planner and To Do can help you manage tasks and projects. They integrate with Outlook, Teams, and OneNote and can help you capture and prioritize all those little tasks that tend to end up scribbled on Post-Its.

Plus Whiteboard, Power Automate, and more. You can find all of the services and features you’ve got by signing into https://microsoft365.com. (Select Apps on the left side of the screen).

From time to time attorneys will send me a document that is “broken”. The formatting is all over the place and they can’t figure out how to fix it. In almost every case the solution is to properly use styles.

Rather than selecting text and apply the font and attributes directly to the text (which we call “Direct formatting”) styles let you assign the font and attributes to the style, and then apply the style to the text (that’s “Indirect formatting”). Styles help keep your text consistent, make document-wide changes trivial, and enable things like the Table of Contents and the Navigation Pane.

Reliable paragraph numbering is done with styles too.

To learn more about Styles see Customize or create new styles.

Got Microsoft 365 questions for your firm? Connect with me, Ben Schorr, on LinkedIn or Bluesky and let me know.