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Here’s a scenario most in-house legal teams are familiar with: juggling case files, coordinating with outside counsel, tracking deadlines across multiple matters, and trying to report meaningful metrics to leadership.
If you're still managing litigation through email chains, shared spreadsheets, and scattered folders, you'll stay behind. Worse still, you’re working ten times harder than you need to because you’re simply inefficient. With a good litigation management system, however, litigation matters can be so much simpler.
This system provides your team with a centralized platform to track cases, collaborate with stakeholders, monitor expenses, and demonstrate your department's value with tangible data.
Here is what you need to know about litigation management systems, why they matter, and which solutions actually deliver value for in-house legal teams.
A litigation management system is software that helps legal departments track, organize, and manage all aspects of their litigation matters. Think of it as mission control for your litigation portfolio.
Instead of hunting through emails for case updates or wondering which outside counsel firm is handling a particular matter, everything is centralized in one platform.
These systems handle case intake, document management, deadline tracking, budget monitoring, and reporting. The best ones easily integrate with your existing tools (like your contract management system or e-signature platform) and provide real-time visibility into your entire litigation portfolio.
So, what makes litigation management systems different from generic project management tools? For starters, they're built for legal workflows. They understand concepts like matter types, practice areas, external counsel relationships, and legal-specific reporting requirements.
With a system like Jira, for instance, you may be able to track litigation, but you'll spend months configuring it and still end up with a solution that doesn't ‘know’ exactly how legal teams actually work.
For in-house teams managing high volumes of legal requests, litigation management is embedded within a broader legal intake and workflow platform.
This approach enables you to handle litigation alongside contracts, compliance matters, employment issues, and all other matters affecting your department from a single source of truth. How convenient is that?
The shift toward these systems reflects a bigger trend in corporate legal departments. Legal is tired of being seen as a cost center. If you want to run legal like a business, with clear metrics, efficient processes, and data that proves its impact, a litigation management system gives you the infrastructure to make that happen.
In-house legal teams that adopt litigation management systems experience tangible improvements in their workflow. These systems fundamentally change how the department operates through:
When litigation details are scattered across emails, spreadsheets, and hard drives, no one has a complete picture.
A litigation management system gives everyone on the legal team (and relevant business stakeholders) real-time access to case information. Who's the outside counsel? What stage is the case in? What's the anticipated resolution date? All of this is visible at a glance.
This visibility also helps with resource allocation. When you can see your entire litigation portfolio in one view, you can identify bottlenecks, redistribute work, and spot patterns.
Maybe one business unit is generating significantly more litigation than others. That's valuable intelligence for conversations with leadership about risk management and resource needs.
Managing outside counsel relationships often feels like herding cats, as different firms employ varying communication methods. Some send monthly invoices, others bill quarterly. Getting consistent reporting across multiple firms is hard without a standardized system.
With a good litigation management system, you get a structured approach to working with external counsel. You can set guidelines for submitting invoices, providing case updates, and sharing documents. Some systems include portals where outside counsel can directly update case information, reducing the back-and-forth emails that eat up your team's time.
This structure also helps with legal spend management. You can track which firms meet budget, which are consistently over, and which provide the best value for different matter types. Armed with this data, you can have informed conversations about fees and potentially renegotiate rates.
Missing a filing deadline is every in-house lawyer's nightmare. But when you're managing dozens or hundreds of deadlines across multiple matters, relying on calendars and memory is a recipe for disaster.
Litigation management systems automate deadline tracking and send reminders. You can set up workflows that automatically assign tasks when certain events occur.
For example, when a complaint is filed, the system can automatically create tasks for the assigned attorney, notify relevant stakeholders, and set calendar reminders for key response deadlines.
This not only prevents chaos but also reduces the mental load on your team. Lawyers can trust the system to remind them of upcoming deadlines, freeing up mental space for strategic thinking.
Here's where litigation management systems become truly invaluable for in-house leaders. The data captured becomes ammunition for conversations with the C-suite.
This reporting capability transforms the way the business views legal. You stop being a cost center that leadership struggles to understand and become a data-driven entity that can clearly articulate its value and its needs. When budget season arrives, you have numbers to justify your resource requests.
The best systems offer more than basic reporting. They also provide predictive insights. For example, based on historical data, the system can predict the likely outcome and cost of a new matter. It can also predict which types of cases tend to settle versus go to trial—real-time actionable intelligence.
Legal teams experience burnout at alarming rates. A major contributor is the sheer volume of administrative work that could be automated but isn't. Lawyers spend many hours each week updating spreadsheets, compiling status reports, and obtaining information from outside counsel.
Litigation management systems eliminate much of this busywork. Information is entered once and flows automatically to everyone who needs it. Reports generate themselves. Reminders and notifications happen without anyone having to think about them.
What does your team do with the time they get back? Higher-value work. Strategic counseling. Risk mitigation. The actual legal work they went to law school to do. This also profoundly impacts their morale and job satisfaction.
Without standardized systems, every lawyer develops their own approach to managing litigation. This creates inconsistency, which in turn creates more problems when someone is out of the office, leaves the company, or needs to hand off a matter. No one else can easily pick up where they left off.
A litigation management system enforces consistent processes. Everyone uses the same intake forms, follows the same workflows, and documents matters in the same way. This consistency makes the team more resilient and makes it easier to onboard new lawyers.
It also improves quality control. When everyone follows established processes, it's easier to spot when something is falling through the cracks. You can identify and fix process gaps before they become major problems.
Litigation management systems are dissimilar. Some are glorified databases with reporting features tacked on. Others offer sophisticated workflow automation and AI-powered insights. Know the features that suit your requirements when evaluating options to avoid expensive mistakes.
The best litigation management systems don't start when a case is filed. They start the moment a potential litigation matter comes into your department. Effective legal intake ensures you capture all relevant information upfront and route matters to the right people immediately.
Look for systems that offer multiple intake channels. It should be able to intake potential litigation matters via email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or web forms. It’s even better if it can intelligently triage these requests based on defined rules, automatically assigning them to the appropriate attorney or practice group.
Modern systems with AI-powered intake can read unstructured intake requests (like emails) and automatically extract key information to populate structured forms. This eliminates the need for requesters to fill out lengthy forms while still ensuring that your team receives the necessary data.
This is the core functionality of any litigation management system. You need to be able to create matter records, associate them with relevant business units or legal entities, assign responsible attorneys, and track case details through resolution.
Strong matter management includes custom fields, so you can track the specific data points your team cares about. The system should be flexible enough to accommodate your specific needs without requiring IT involvement for every change.
Document management should be tightly integrated with matter management. All case-related documents should be associated with the matter record, so they are easier to find later. Version control, permission settings, and audit trails are essential for maintaining document integrity and security.
Manual processes reduce efficiency. The best litigation management systems enable you to automate repetitive tasks and workflows, allowing your team to focus on substantive work.
Workflow automation can handle tasks like automatically assigning new matters based on attorney availability or practice area, sending notification emails when case status changes, creating standard task lists when certain matter types are initiated, and escalating matters that haven't been updated within a specified timeframe.
Prioritize systems that offer workflow automation without requiring coding skills. Your legal operations team should be able to build and modify workflows through an intuitive interface, without involving the IT department.
Litigation costs can quickly spiral out of control. A good litigation management system enables you to effectively monitor spending against budgets and identify overruns before they escalate.
You can set budgets at the matter level, track actual spending from outside counsel invoices, compare budgeted versus actual costs, and receive alerts when matters are approaching or exceeding budget.
You can streamline this process by integrating with e-billing systems. Instead of manually entering invoice data, the system can automatically pull it in and associate charges with the correct matters. This provides real-time visibility into legal spend at a glance.
Your litigation management system should make it easy to answer common questions from leadership, such as: How many active matters do we have? What's our total litigation exposure? How much are we spending with each outside counsel firm? What's our win rate for different matter types?
Look for systems that offer both standard reports and customizable reporting. Standard reports cover common scenarios and work out of the box. Custom reporting lets you slice and dice your data to answer specific questions as they arise.
A litigation management system shouldn't exist in a silo. It needs to integrate seamlessly with your existing legal technology stack, including contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems, e-signature platforms, document management systems, and communication tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Strong integration capabilities mean less manual data entry and fewer errors. When your litigation system and CLM integrate, you can easily link contracts to litigation matters and see which agreements are generating disputes.
Legal data is among the most sensitive information in any organization. Therefore, a litigation management system must meet enterprise-grade security standards.
This includes role-based access controls (so people only see information they're authorized to access), audit trails showing who accessed or modified what information and when, data encryption both in transit and at rest, and SOC 2 compliance or other relevant security certifications.
Don't take vendors’ word on security. Ask for documentation of their security practices and compliance certifications. If you can, ask their existing customers if they've experienced any security issues.
Choosing the right litigation management system depends on your team's needs, existing tech stack, and budget. Here's an honest evaluation of five leading options, including what each does well and where they fall short.
Streamline AI takes a different approach to litigation management. Instead of offering a standalone system, Streamline AI provides an intelligent intake and workflow automation platform that handles all types of legal requests, including litigation matters.
This unified approach is ideal for in-house teams that want to manage their entire legal operation in one place, not just litigation.
In-house legal teams at mid-market and enterprise companies ($100M to $5B revenue) managing high volumes of diverse legal requests (litigation, contracts, compliance, employment matters) and looking to modernize from manual processes or outdated tools.
Streamline was built by Kathy Zhu, a former Associate General Counsel at DoorDash, who experienced firsthand the chaos of managing high volumes of legal requests with inadequate tools. She partnered with Julian Wimbush, a product lead and former engineer at Google, to create a solution specifically for in-house legal workflows.
The platform shines in three key areas. First, it's genuinely intuitive. Legal teams can set up workflows and customize forms without needing IT assistance. Most customers are up and running in weeks, not months.
Second, the AI capabilities are sophisticated but practical. The AI email intake feature automatically reads incoming unstructured emails and creates structured legal requests, saving hours of data entry.
Third, the platform provides the data that in-house legal leaders need to change how their organizations view legal. You can track not just what legal is working on, but where bottlenecks actually exist (often in the business, not legal).
Contact us for custom pricing tailored to your team size and specific needs. We offer white-glove onboarding and implementation support to get your team fully launched within 3-4 weeks.
Book a demo to see how Streamline AI can help your team modernize legal intake, automate workflows, and gain the visibility you need to run legal efficiently. The sales process is consultative, designed to help us better understand your challenges and determine if Streamline AI is the right solution for you.
Mitratech offers a suite of legal software, including TeamConnect for matter and litigation management. It's one of the more established players in the enterprise legal management space.
Large enterprises with complex legal operations and dedicated IT resources to manage implementation and configuration.
Mitratech's biggest strength is its breadth. The platform can handle virtually any legal workflow you throw at it. The reporting capabilities are powerful, and the system integrates with many other legal tech tools.
However, this comprehensiveness comes at a cost. Mitratech implementations are notoriously complex and time-consuming, often taking 6-12 months (or longer) to complete.
The user interface feels dated compared to newer entrants. For many users, making even simple changes requires IT or vendor support. If your team is looking for a system that can be quickly configured and adapted as needs change, Mitratech may not tick those boxes.
LawVu positions itself as a modern legal operations platform with a strong focus on user experience and ease of use. In practice, it tends to be most valuable as an all-in-one system for contract lifecycle management and legal spend visibility, particularly for teams that want more standardized processes and clearer reporting without adopting a heavyweight enterprise platform.
Mid-market companies looking for a modern, user-friendly platform to manage contracts and outside counsel spend with solid reporting, without extensive IT involvement.
LawVu’s interface is clean and intuitive, which can make adoption easier than some legacy enterprise legal management systems. Setup is typically faster than platforms that require extensive customization, and the company is known for strong customer support.
The main limitation is depth and flexibility. While LawVu covers essential legal ops use cases, teams with highly complex workflows may find it less configurable than they need, and reporting is not as extensive as some enterprise-focused competitors. If your biggest priority is operational workflow automation across all legal request types, you may still need additional tooling to match that intake-and-workflow-centric model.
SimpleLegal was acquired by Onit and is now part of their broader legal operations platform. The system is best understood as an e-billing and legal spend management solution for teams that need tighter control over outside counsel costs, budgeting, and vendor performance.
Legal departments with high external legal spend looking to improve invoice review, budget tracking, and visibility into outside counsel costs.
If your primary pain point is outside counsel spend, SimpleLegal is strong. The e-billing workflows help standardize invoicing, and spend analytics can surface cost-reduction opportunities and trendlines across firms and matter types.
Where it is less differentiated is operational workflow management. The platform is primarily oriented around the financial side of legal work, so teams that need sophisticated intake, triage, and end-to-end workflow automation for litigation operations may still need a separate system to manage how work enters Legal and moves through internal stakeholders.
Jira isn't purpose-built for legal, but some teams use it for litigation and matter management because it's already deployed across their organization for software development or project management.
Legal teams required by IT to use enterprise-standard tools, or teams comfortable with heavily customizing a generic project management platform for legal use.
Jira's biggest advantage is that it’s already available in most organizations. It's also highly customizable and can technically be configured to support legal workflows.
However, using Jira for legal operations is like using a Swiss Army knife in place of a surgeon's scalpel. It can work, but it requires significant time and effort to configure correctly. Every workflow change typically requires IT involvement.
The terminology and interface are built for software development, not legal work, which can confuse business stakeholders trying to submit legal requests. Most importantly, it lacks legal-specific features that purpose-built systems offer, like matter-specific reporting, legal intake forms, and integrations with legal tech tools.
Teams using Jira for legal management often spend more time configuring it than they would with a proper legal operations platform. The only scenario where Jira makes sense is if your company absolutely mandates its use across all departments.
Selecting a litigation management system is a decision that significantly impacts how your legal team operates. Making the wrong choice means wasting time and money on implementation, frustrating your team with a system they can’t use, and having to go through the whole selection process again in a few years.
Here's how to approach the decision strategically:
Don't start by looking at software. Begin by understanding your current challenges and what success entails. Let the legal team and key stakeholders answer these questions:
Pay attention to recurring problems. If everyone mentions that tracking outside counsel spend is a nightmare, prioritize systems with strong e-billing and spend management features.
If the challenge is triaging incoming matters and getting them to the right people quickly, focus on platforms with sophisticated intake and workflow automation.
Do not build a requirements list that includes every possible feature. Focus on the handful of things that will make the biggest difference to your team's effectiveness and efficiency.
A sophisticated system that takes 18 months to implement may deliver less value than a simpler system you can launch in a month. Implementation complexity impacts not just when you see benefits, but whether your team sticks with the system long enough to realize those benefits.
Ask vendors for realistic implementation timelines. Discuss with their existing customers how long the implementation actually took, compared to what was initially promised. Understand what resources you'll need to commit from your team. Will you need dedicated IT support? How much time will your legal team need to invest in configuration and testing?
Systems designed for legal teams are typically implemented faster than enterprise platforms that require extensive customization. This is one area where Streamline AI particularly excels, with most customers fully launching in 3-4 weeks compared to 6-12 months for some enterprise legal management systems.
A good system is worthless if your team can't use it. Legal professionals are busy and often skeptical of technology that makes their jobs more difficult. If a system has a steep learning curve or requires jumping through hoops to complete basic tasks, adoption will be low.
During vendor demos, pay close attention to how intuitive the interface is. Can you accomplish common tasks without training? Would business stakeholders who aren't tech-savvy be able to submit legal requests easily? Can your legal ops team configure workflows and forms without involving IT?
Ask vendors about their onboarding and training programs. Good vendors don't just hand you software and wish you luck. They provide structured onboarding, training materials, and ongoing support to ensure your team succeeds.
Your litigation management system needs to integrate seamlessly with your existing technology stack. If it doesn't work with your CLM, document management system, communication tools, or other critical platforms, you'll end up with data silos and manual work transferring information between systems.
Make a list of your existing legal tech tools and business systems. Ask vendors specifically about integration capabilities with each one. Don't accept vague promises that they can "integrate with anything through APIs." You want to see either pre-built integrations or clear evidence that they've successfully integrated with your specific tools for other customers.
Remember that integrations have ongoing maintenance costs. Who will support the integrations when something breaks? If it's your IT team, make sure they're on board with taking on this responsibility.
Choose a system that can grow with your legal department. You might have 5 lawyers today, but if your company is growing rapidly, you could have 15 lawyers in two years. Can the system handle that growth without requiring a complete reimplementation?
Also consider functionality growth. You may initially implement the system solely for litigation purposes, but within a year, you may want to expand it to include contracts or compliance matters. Systems that handle multiple types of legal work give you room to grow without needing to buy another platform.
The sticker price is just part of the total cost. Consider implementation costs (consulting fees, IT resources, legal team time), training costs, ongoing subscription or licensing fees, integration costs, and the cost of any required hardware or infrastructure.
Also consider the cost of not choosing the right system. If you choose a system that doesn't meet your needs and have to replace it within two years, you've not only wasted money but also the opportunity cost of the improvements you could have achieved with a better system.
If possible, negotiate a proof of concept or trial period before committing to a full implementation. Use this time to test the system with real workflows and real users. Can you actually accomplish what the vendor promised? Does the system integrate as smoothly as claimed?
Involve your broader legal team in the testing process. The lawyers who will use the system daily often spot usability issues that may not be apparent in carefully choreographed vendor demos.
Don't just talk to the happy customers the vendor provides. Ask for references from companies similar to yours in size, industry, and use case. Ask these references the hard questions:
Also, look for online reviews on platforms like G2 or Capterra. These tend to be more candid than vendor-provided references and can reveal common complaints or issues that may not be mentioned in vendor-provided references.
If you're managing litigation through emails, spreadsheets, and manual processes, you're unknowingly sacrificing efficiency. Litigation management systems give in-house legal teams the infrastructure to handle cases efficiently, collaborate seamlessly with stakeholders, control costs, and demonstrate their value with real data.
However, the right system depends on your needs. Large enterprises with complex requirements might need the comprehensive capabilities of platforms like Mitratech, despite longer implementation times. Mid-market teams often find better fits with modern, intuitive platforms that strike a balance between functionality and ease of use.
But here's what we know from years of working with in-house legal teams: the best litigation management approach is often part of a broader legal operations platform. Legal departments don't just handle litigation. They manage contracts, employment matters, compliance issues, and dozens of other request types.
Managing these in separate systems creates data silos and complexity.
This is why many forward-thinking legal teams are opting for platforms that consolidate all legal requests in one place, categorizing litigation as just one matter type among many.
This unified approach provides a single source of truth for all legal work, enhances visibility into your team's capacity and workload, and enables you to report on your department's impact across all functions.
Streamline AI is designed to address the daily challenges that in-house legal teams encounter. Whether it's litigation, contracts, compliance matters, or any other type of legal work, Streamline AI provides intelligent intake, workflow automation, and the analytics you need to run your legal practice like a business.
What sets Streamline AI apart is that it was created by someone who lived your pain. Kathy Zhu, Streamline's co-founder, built this platform because she couldn't find anything else that actually worked the way in-house legal teams work.
The result is a system that's intuitive enough to set up in a matter of weeks, powerful enough to handle complex workflows, and sophisticated enough to provide the data you need to prove your department's value.
With Streamline AI, you can reduce time to close legal requests by up to 50%, gain visibility into where work actually gets stuck (often outside legal), and finally have the metrics to justify budget and headcount requests.
Book a demo today to see how Streamline AI can transform your legal operations.
Implementation timelines vary depending on the chosen system. Enterprise platforms, like Mitratech, may require 6-12 months or longer, whereas modern, legal-specific platforms like Streamline AI can be fully operational in 3-4 weeks.
The key is choosing a system built specifically for legal workflows rather than generic project management tools that require months of customization.
Adoption succeeds when systems are intuitive and eliminate work rather than create it. Systems built by people who understand in-house legal workflows see much higher adoption rates than tools adapted from software development or project management.
During demos, test whether you can accomplish common tasks without training and whether your legal team can configure workflows without IT involvement.
Lead with data showing that these systems reduce administrative work by up to 50% and provide visibility into outside counsel spending to identify cost-saving opportunities.
Instead of requesting a software budget, present a business case quantifying current pain points in time and money, then demonstrate how the system addresses those specific costs.
The strongest argument is demonstrating how the time currently spent by lawyers on spreadsheets and status reports could be redirected to strategic legal work.
Most in-house legal teams handle more than just litigation—they manage contracts, employment matters, compliance issues, and other requests.
A unified legal operations platform that handles all legal work provides a single source of truth, better visibility into team capacity, and comprehensive reporting on your department's impact. For most mid-market and enterprise in-house teams, the benefits of consolidation outweigh the advantages of litigation-specific specialization.
Scale your legal team's efficiency and effectiveness with modern workflow automation tools designed for in-house legal.
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