Ask most law firm IT leaders about Microsoft 365, and you will hear a version of the same lament: we are using a fraction of what we pay for. The numbers bear it out. Independent analysis of millions of users has found that more than half of all Microsoft 365 licenses sit inactive, underused, oversized, or unassigned. The usual response is to push harder on adoption -- more training, more champions, another lunch-and-learn. It rarely works because it answers the wrong question.
The problem is not that firms have failed to use Microsoft 365. It is that they have never structured it by deciding what it is for, documenting it, and governing it beyond Microsoft Office and email.
For most firms, Microsoft 365 filled up the way an attic does: by default, one decision at a time, with no one stepping back to ask where things should actually go. SharePoint became the intranet. Teams became the place where documents quietly live as shared links. OneDrive became wherever a file happened to land. None of that was designed. It accumulated. And because it accumulated rather than being planned, the firm ended up with a platform it owns completely and governs barely at all.
Underneath the sprawl is a decision the firm did make, correctly, and then never extended. A document management system such as iManage or NetDocuments is built around the matter-centric way lawyers work, and for client and matter content, it is exactly right. The trouble is everything else. Finance, IT, marketing, and HR do not work in matters, yet for lack of a deliberate alternative, their content gets forced into a matter-centric system that it was never meant for or scattered across Microsoft 365 with no structure at all. Microsoft, for its part, builds for the broad market -- the 80% of needs common to every industry -- so its tools arrive powerful and generic, ready to be shaped and almost never shaped.
The result is not a usage gap. It is architecture that no one designed.
This is why the standard fixes disappoint. You cannot train your way out of a structural problem. Forrester has put the return on a well-run Microsoft 365 deployment north of 200%, but that return is contingent on the platform being used deliberately -- and deliberate is precisely what most deployments are not. Firms pay a premium for the security and compliance capabilities bundled into their top-tier licenses and leave them switched off. They then pay, separately, to keep users in an expensive matter-centric DMS when they have no matters to manage. Both bills are symptoms of the same missing decision.
So, what does deciding actually look like? Not, to be clear, a wholesale move of lawyers out of the DMS and into SharePoint. That is the wrong reading of this argument and the wrong move for many mid-to-large firms. Matter content belongs in the DMS, where matter-centric workflows live. The decision worth making is about everything else -- and about the people who do not work in matters at all.
In practice, that decision has four parts:
1. Draw the line. Decide what content genuinely belongs in the DMS -- client and matter work, the document-discipline lawyers depend on -- and what belongs in a properly structured Microsoft 365. Finance, marketing, IT, HR, the intranet, internal collaboration, project workspaces: the default home for these is M365, not the DMS.
2. Move the people the DMS was never for. Business-services users who have no matters to manage do not need a DMS seat. Move them and the licenses that go with them into Microsoft 365.
3. Close the SharePoint gap on purpose. Out of the box, SharePoint will store almost anything, but it was never built to file or retrieve documents the way lawyers work -- no matter-style profiling, no single search across every repository, none of the filing discipline a DMS makes automatic. Deciding content belongs in M365 is the easy part. Making M365 behave like a place lawyers can actually work takes capability the platform does not ship with, added deliberately on top of it.
4. Govern each place for what it holds. Once the line is drawn, retention, security, and access controls can be set for the realities of each environment instead of one set of rules pretending to cover both.
Do those four things, and the rest begins to resolve. The licenses you are paying for line up with the work people actually do. The security and compliance capabilities bundled into your top-tier seats get switched on instead of sitting dormant. Copilot finally has a clean, reachable body of content to work with instead of starving on fragmentation. The AI case is real, but it sits downstream of the same decision. Get the architecture right, and AI becomes possible; skip it, and no amount of Copilot licensing will rescue it.
This is the difference between optimizing and modernizing. Optimizing squeezes more out of the tools a firm already runs without questioning the shape they came in. Modernizing decides, on purpose, what the platform is for -- and then makes it behave that way. The 20% problem is, in the end, a modernization problem dressed up as an adoption one.
The firms that pull ahead over the next few years will not be the ones that used the most Microsoft 365 or bought the most AI to sit on top of it. It will be the ones that decided what their platform is for, and then made it behave that way. That is the conversation I will be having at ILTACON in Nashville this August on the panel “Unifying M365: Hidden Capabilities Transforming Collaboration and Automation” -- about how firms move from an accumulated platform to a designed one. Microsoft 365 is not really underused. It is unstructured. The work is to structure it.