Put your organization’s knowledge to work with iManage plugin for Microsoft Copilot Cowork

Microsoft Copilot Cowork now connects to the iManage knowledge work platform, so research, drafting, and briefings draw on organization knowledge while enforcing every ethical wall and information barrier. Over 40 percent of clients who connect AI to the iManage Cloud connect through Microsoft Copilot.

Knowledge workers need the AI they already use to draw on the institutional knowledge their organization has spent decades building. Microsoft Copilot Cowork plans and executes multi-step work across the Microsoft 365 suite, from research to drafting to delivery. Where standard Copilot answers a question or drafts a passage inline as you work in Word, Outlook, Excel, or PowerPoint, Cowork takes on the whole task: it plans the steps, carries them out, and hands back a finished result rather than a single response. But an AI assistant is only as useful as the knowledge it can reach, and for most firms, the most valuable knowledge lives in iManage: precedents, prior work product, and the matter context that explains what's relevant and why.

Copilot Cowork can now put that knowledge to work. Making Knowledge Work™ means every answer Cowork delivers can be grounded in your organization's institutional knowledge, with every safeguard intact.

What you can do with the integration

Ground Cowork in organization knowledge. When Cowork researches an issue, drafts a document, or assembles a briefing, it draws on your iManage content alongside everything else in Microsoft 365, so outputs reflect how your organization actually does the work.

Retrieve precedents and prior work product. Cowork can find and pull in the documents that matter, from precedent agreements to prior positions, without anyone switching platforms or knowing exactly where to look.

Keep every safeguard intact. Every request runs through iManage governance. Need-to-know security, ethical walls, and information barriers apply to AI exactly as they apply to people, with a full audit trail. Experts stay in control, and the system shows its work.

The reason organizations are stalling today is straightforward: When AI draws from content that lacks context, it produces output that’s plausible, but wrong. Lawyers can’t defend it, they stop trusting it, and adoption collapses. The fix isn’t a better model. It’s better input.

Key use cases

1. Research that respects the walls and still surfaces what matters. One law firm locked down its environment with strict ethical walls and need-to-know security but didn't want users to lose sight of firm knowledge and previous work in the process. Their approach: When Cowork identifies content that appears relevant but sits behind a wall, it alerts the researcher that potentially relevant knowledge exists, without exposing a word of it. The researcher can request access from the content owner; if approved, the material joins the research, and if not, the wall holds. All queries are logged, and audit data is maintained. Knowledge is discovered, owners maintain control, and barriers stay intact.

2. Drafting from precedent. Ask Cowork to draft an agreement and it runs the task end-to-end: it searches your organization’s precedents collection in iManage for the closest match, drafts the clauses to reflect the current deal terms, checks formatting against the organization’s style, and delivers a ready-to-edit Word document. What used to require finding the right starting point, editing it to fit, and reformatting now takes minutes, run as one coordinated sequence instead of several manual steps.

3. Getting up to speed on a matter. Ask Cowork for a briefing before a client call and it runs the full sequence itself: pulling the relevant matter content from iManage, scanning recent emails and calendar entries for what has changed, and assembling the result into a single briefing ready in Word or Outlook. Preparation starts from a complete view instead of a search, and the briefing is ready in the minutes before the call rather than pulled together by hand.

A partnership a decade in the making

"Over the past decade, Microsoft and iManage have built a depth of relationship in the UK legal market that goes well beyond technology integration. As Copilot becomes ubiquitous and we move towards a vision of the frontier firm, iManage is the modern, robust knowledge platform that makes that vision possible," said Paul Kelly, Senior Director and Head of Professional Services, Microsoft UK. "The joint commercial successes we've achieved together, from A&O Shearman to Clifford Chance to Eversheds Sutherland, are a direct result of that closeness, and we look forward to continuing to help our firms connect their data, drive consumption, and embrace AI at scale."

Get started

The integration, powered by the iManage MCP Server, is available today for iManage Cloud customers. Contact your account team to connect Copilot Cowork to your organization’s knowledge, or request a demo to see it in action.