Ascertus blog

Matter management chaos - getting control of legal operations

Categories: Legal Operations

Typically, corporations are spread across multiple subsidiaries, jurisdictions, and locations. Imagine the scope, type, and volume of legal work that would come into the corporate legal department? In some organisations, the legal department can quite literally receive net new requests for legal contracts alone in the 1000s annually – never mind any other type of business-related matters.

The data and process mayhem: matter management challenges

Legal professionals face numerous challenges in matter management, which can significantly impact their efficiency, productivity, and overall service quality. These issues stem from the complex nature of legal work and the need to manage vast amounts of information across multiple cases and internal clients.

Data fragmentation is a primary challenge for many legal professionals. Legal information is frequently scattered across various systems, databases, and formats, making it challenging to access and manage data consistently. This fragmentation can lead to incomplete case records, difficulty in retrieving critical information, and potential oversights that could affect case outcomes. The lack of a centralised, easily accessible data repository can result in wasted time and an increased risk of errors.

Inefficient workflows pose another significant challenge. Many legal departments still rely on outdated or manual processes, which can create bottlenecks, cause delays, and increase administrative workload. These inefficiencies not only reduce overall productivity but also divert legal professionals' time and attention from high-value tasks that require their expertise.

Compliance and risk management are critical areas that require constant attention. Legal professionals must stay abreast of ever-changing regulations and ensure compliance across all their activities. Managing associated risks demands continuous effort and monitoring. Failure to address these aspects effectively can lead to serious legal and financial consequences.

Communication and collaboration challenges often arise in legal matter management. Coordinating efforts between different teams, departments, and external parties can be difficult, leading to communication gaps and inefficiencies. These issues can result in misunderstandings, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities for synergy.

Meeting internal client expectations has become increasingly challenging in the modern legal landscape. Stakeholders demand greater transparency, timely updates, and efficient service delivery. Without robust matter management practices and systems, legal professionals struggle to meet these expectations, potentially damaging internal client relationships and reputations.

Don't have a matter management system? Visit our Lawcadia legal operations product page for a full list of benefits

From chaos to control: technology aids matter management

Using technology to manage matters, optimise internal and external resources, and meet the needs of the business promptly, presents a realistic and practical way of demonstrably delivering value to organisation. Implementing the right technology also empowers legal departments to create an efficient self-service system, streamlining common legal processes for internal stakeholders – and in doing so easing the burden of the department too.

Matter management is a comprehensive approach to organising, tracking, and optimising legal operations within corporate legal departments. At its core, matter management aims to streamline legal processes, enhance efficiency, and improve overall productivity in handling legal cases and issues.

Among the primary elements of matter management are triaging and matter tracking. This involves maintaining a comprehensive record of all intakes as well as active and closed legal matters, including essential details such as case information, timelines, critical deadlines, and regular status updates. Such a tracking system ensures that legal professionals can quickly access and review the progress of any given case, facilitating efficient matter management and decision-making.

Task and workflow management is essential for efficient matter management too. This involves assigning tasks to appropriate team members, setting priorities, and managing workflows to ensure the timely completion of legal work. By implementing effective task management systems, legal departments improve productivity, meet deadlines, and maintain high-quality service standards.

Time and billing management is another vital component of matter management to help record time spent by in-house professionals, manage law firm invoices, and track expenses related to legal matters. It is crucial for maintaining financial transparency, ensuring the value that external counsel provides, and optimising budgets.

Compliance and risk management form a critical part of matter management. This involves implementing systems and processes to ensure that all legal practices adhere to relevant laws, regulations, and internal policies. It also includes identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks associated with various legal matters, thereby protecting the organisation from potential legal and financial repercussions.

All these components, when seamlessly connected, facilitate smooth legal ops.

Lawcadia: streamlines legal operations through comprehensive matter management

Lawcadia’s matter management system offers an approach to help overcome many of these issues and challenges.

A centralised data management platform

Facilitating a single, centralised location where all legal matters, documents, and communications are stored and easily accessible. Lawcadia easily integrates with most of the widely used technologies, tools, and systems such as Microsoft Word and Outlook, iManage, NetDocuments, and Content Manager. This removes data fragmentation and improves data accuracy, consistency, and integrity.

Efficient workflows

The solution helps to optimise processes by automating workflows for routine, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. This helps to both remove the bottlenecks and streamline processes such as intake and triage of legal requests. At a more advanced level, legal departments can also automate processes such as task assignment across internal and external resources, populating templates, or routinely reporting on critical data points.

Insight into legal spend

With budget constraints a constant challenge, Lawcadia provides legal departments with transparency and visibility of legal spend to facilitate control through the ability to track billable hours and expenses. Additionally, the solution offers advanced analytics to help gain insight into internal and external spend.

Reducing compliance and risk

Compliance is an evolving arena. Lawcadia provides best practice workflows for all manner of workflows – from financial services and data breach reporting to privacy management. The solution can be configured to not only mitigate compliance issues right at the start of the intake and triage processes but also right through the lifecycle of matters. Legal teams can escalate issues and if action is required, professionals can automatically brief, engage, and collaborate with external counsel too as needed.

Communication and collaboration

Lawcadia serves as a platform for seamless communication and collaboration among legal teams and external parties. It also offers a portal for better engagement and transparency with external counsel and law firms.

Matter management is central to smooth and streamlined legal operations. It offers a range of functionality that helps to optimise legal service delivery to the business, by automating repetitive, administrative tasks so that legal professionals can focus efforts on the more strategic aspects of their work efficiently.

What is matter management?

Matter management is a process of managing a matter from start to finish -i.e., from the receipt and intake of a legal matter, through tracking its progress and ongoing collaboration and communication to completion.

Why do corporate legal departments need matter management?

Due to the types and volume of matters legal departments have to deal with daily, matter management empowers legal teams to streamline the processes end-to-end, supported by automated workflows and analytics. The efficiency and insight this approach delivers minimises risk and allows legal professionals to focus on the more strategic requirements of the business.

What is the difference between matter management and contract management?

Matter management encompasses the management of all corporate legal matters while the contract management discipline is entirely focussed on the process of managing legal agreements through their lifecycle.