Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks are designed to help lawyers and legal teams organize their materials and work more efficiently. These notebooks can be thought of as matter binders with an AI assistant attached, allowing users to gather relevant information and ask focused questions to get useful work product faster.
Legal work often involves dealing with a large amount of information from various sources, such as emails, documents, and meeting notes. The challenge is finding the right information at the right time. Copilot Notebooks provide a focused workspace for legal professionals to collect and organize their materials, making it easier to ask better questions and get relevant answers.
A Copilot Notebook is an AI-powered workspace inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, where users can add references such as Word documents, PowerPoint decks, Excel workbooks, and other Microsoft 365 content. Copilot then uses this selected material as the basis for answers, summaries, and drafts.
Once references are added to a Copilot Notebook, users can ask questions, summarize content, and discuss it with the AI. For example, they can ask Copilot to create a table of dates and deadlines mentioned in documents or compare an incident report to an employee handbook to identify possible policy violations.
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Copilot can also generate interactive mind maps based on the themes in the references, allowing users to click through the map and see how things relate to each other. Additionally, Copilot can create audio overviews of the references, which can be useful for reviewing information on-the-go.
One attorney I work with said she has to review board of director meeting minutes, so she uploads the PDFs of the meeting minutes (and other relevant documents) into a Copilot Notebook, has it generate an audio overview, then she saves that audio file to OneDrive. She can then take her dog for a walk, open the audio file on her phone, and listen to it while they walk.
There are several practical uses for Copilot Notebooks in legal work, including collecting key pleadings, correspondence, and notes to draft a plain-English summary or flag open issues. They can also be used for contract review and negotiation support, litigation chronology and issue development, and drafting updates for clients or general counsel.
Copilot Notebooks can also be used for training and knowledge management, such as onboarding new team members or creating practice-group standards. By collecting guides, samples, presentations, and FAQs in one workspace, Copilot can help draft updates and provide tailored information to different audiences.
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They differ from Copilot Chat in that they provide a persistent body of context that can be returned to as work evolves, rather than a one-off conversation. A Copilot Notebook is also a walled garden, grounded only on the references provided, rather than drawing from a wide set of content across Microsoft 365 and the public web.
To get started with Copilot Notebooks, lawyers can start small by picking a defined task and building a notebook around it.
As with any AI tool, it’s essential to verify important output and curate references carefully to ensure the accuracy and relevance of the information. By using Copilot Notebooks effectively, lawyers can bridge legal knowledge management and AI-assisted work, helping teams define tasks, collect the right materials, and ask focused questions of a specifically scoped set of reference material.
Effective use requires careful curation.
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