Cutting document review by38%.

Whitmore & Bell is a 180-fee-earner commercial firm in Manchester. Like most practices its size, it sat on years of privileged correspondence, draft agreements and matter files spread across SharePoint, OneDrive and a legacy file server — almost none of it classified. Fee-earners were quietly pasting clauses into consumer AI tools to speed up drafting, and the partners knew it.

The firm wanted Microsoft 365 Copilot. The problem: Copilot surfaces everything a user can already see, and in this tenant that was far too much. With the SRA tightening its line on confidentiality and AI, the COLP would not sign off a rollout until the firm could prove privileged material stayed where it belonged.

We refused to switch Copilot on until classification was solved. Working with the firm’s risk team, we designed a Microsoft Purview sensitivity-label scheme around how the practice actually works — Public, Internal, Client-Confidential and Privileged — and rolled it out with auto-labelling on the matter libraries that mattered most.

With labels in place we hardened the tenant: Conditional Access, DLP policies that block privileged content leaving the firm, and a Secure-by-Design rebuild that lifted the Microsoft Secure Score from 38 to 94. Only then did we pilot Copilot for Word and Outlook with the litigation team, ethical walls enforced, before opening it up firm-wide.

Blind-tested against the firm’s own benchmark, standard contract review dropped from 38 minutes to 23 — a 38% reduction — and fee-earners reported getting back an average of 12.4 hours each per week. The Secure Score sat at 94, and in the four months since rollout there has not been a single privilege incident attributable to Copilot.

Crucially, the COLP signed off Copilot for the whole firm — something three previous consultancies had told Whitmore & Bell would take the best part of a year.