DLA Piper's Early Microsoft 365 Copilot Rollout Targets Up to 36 Hours a Week in Time Savings

As one of the world's largest law firms, DLA Piper needed to manage complex documents, keep consistency across global teams, and streamline workflows. It sought a program that would improve productivity and cut time spent on low-value administrative and content-generation tasks.

DLA Piper became the first major law firm to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot, starting with several hundred licenses under a "coalition of the willing" of enthusiastic early adopters. The firm stood up a dedicated task force and a Microsoft Teams repository for sharing best practices and prompts, and first shored up data governance — encryption, ethical wall software, and Microsoft Purview Data Governance — to meet its professional responsibility obligations to clients before expanding the rollout firm-wide.

Copilot helped staff draft documents, convert Word files into PowerPoint presentations, and pull imagery and data insights from spreadsheets faster. Early internal experiments suggested it could save up to 36 hours per week in content generation and data analysis for operational and administrative teams, with faster, more accurate internal reporting from data-heavy documents.

• Locking down data governance (encryption, ethical walls, Purview) before rollout was the prerequisite that let DLA Piper confidently expand Copilot to the wider firm.
• A voluntary "coalition of the willing" of enthusiastic early adopters plus a shared best-practices repository drove faster, lower-friction adoption than a firm-wide mandate.
• Copilot delivered the clearest value on lower-value, repetitive tasks (drafting, Word-to-PowerPoint conversion, spreadsheet analysis), freeing staff for higher-value work.