Peppermint Technology has incorporated Microsoft’s Copilot into its suite of primary applications, including client engagement, case & matter management, and work management, we can reveal.
Copilot is an AI assistant feature for Microsoft 365 applications, based on OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4. Because Peppermint is built within the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform environment, there is an interoperability between the Microsoft platform and Peppermint’s solutions.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Peppermint’s chief technology officer Mike Walker described the introduction of Copilot within both the Microsoft and Peppermint platform as “revolutionary,” observing that that data privacy and security changes have now opened up the use of Copilot to law firms. “Copilot isn’t trained on your data and a lot of the security scenarios and concerns are being considered in the approach,” Walker said. “Microsoft has spent a lot of time making sure that anything you send to prompt engineering will stay resident to your data and those foundations have made it more possible for law firms to use.”
Peppermint is using OpenAI Azure Service for the implementation and using prompt engineering to gather information from emails such as signature information, comparing it with the content of the records inside the CRM.
Walker said: “We’re still embracing third party tools such as Introhive and they provide lots of additional points of interest but we’re seeing this strategy as augmenting those tools. For us it’s about innovating around the rich assets within the data and exposing that during the work lifecycle e.g. drafting an email or chat message, suggesting actions you may have committed in previous communications or suggesting topics of conversation and starting a response with a single click.”
He adds: “We have been doing a lot of innovative work and hackathons with Microsoft and have been talking about this for a while. We did some projects with them last year and then suddenly there was a ramp up of a new approach called “prompt engineering” and leveraging GPT. We had a few things already baked in but seeing Microsoft come to market with this created a paradigm shift: I see it as equally as important as the internet in accessing information in a totally different way.”
Users will also be able to develop workflow tools within the case management system to automate email responses and letters to the client that incorporate caseload updates. Walker said: “Because Peppermint is built natively within the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform environment, we are able to provide insights and experiences using an approach that changes the humanity of how you deliver services, delivering over and above what the client expects.”
With regard to the cost of the new offering, early conversations suggest that it will be a tokenised model based on levels of functionality and usage. The law firms that Peppermint has engaged with so far are keen to have control and a cap on spending, but Walker says: “The response so far is that the return they get is so material that they see a value in paying for it.”