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In-house legal teams need to stay organized and efficient at scale to keep up with the pace of business. Matter management is a crucial factor in the efficiency of legal team operations. Without effective matter management, workflows are chaotic, lawyers get burned out, and legal leaders lack the data they need to advocate for additional resources.
In this post, we’ll define matter management for in-house and corporate legal teams and offer best practices that can help you improve your team’s efficiency.
The term “matter management” originates from traditional law firms, where tracking the tasks and time of legal professionals is crucial for billing clients appropriately. Today, the term is more often used by in-house legal teams to describe the process of organizing and tracking corporate legal work.
The most important (and complex) aspect of matter management is legal intake and triage, where matters are located and routed to the correct team members. Beyond intake, matter management also encompasses document management, request deadline tracking, and communication between team members.
A dedicated matter management tool transforms how legal departments operate. It delivers measurable benefits that directly impact team productivity and business outcomes.
For corporate legal departments, the goal of matter management is to efficiently manage internal requests. Generally, that means involving outside counsel as little as possible to minimize legal spending.
That said, matter management includes tracking both internal and external matters.
Internal matters: Sales and vendor contracts, marketing compliance requests, open source license reviews, HR and employment issues, and general inquiries from the business.
External matters: Litigation, antitrust and competition, mergers and acquisitions, venture and debt financing, bankruptcy, IP prosecution, workplace investigations, and securities litigation.
Want to go deeper into in-house matter management? Check out our ultimate guide for legal teams.
The types of legal matters a traditional law firm handles depend on its industry specialties and practice areas. For a real estate law firm, matters include property sales and purchases, title disputes, and zoning issues. In family law, lawyers handle divorce proceedings, negotiate child custody arrangements, and argue for spousal support.
Still other firms specialize in trust and estate planning, assisting individuals and families with guardianships, wills, estate taxes, and more.
Regardless of what type of law a firm practices, its goal is to track legal matters closely and bill clients for the time lawyers spend on each project or case. This differs from internal legal teams, where time isn’t directly billable, so the goal is to resolve requests as efficiently as possible without requiring additional resources (e.g., hiring more lawyers or paying outside counsel).
While both matter and case management deal with legal requests, they differ.
Matter management offers a holistic view of an organization's legal function, focusing on workflow efficiency. It encompasses all types of legal work, including litigious and non-litigious matters. By contrast, case management dives deep into the micro-level intricacies of individual litigation cases, focusing on documents, deadlines, and court requirements.
ELM is the broader concept of managing the legal enterprise. It includes matter management, contract lifecycle management, compliance management, reporting and analytics, e-billing, and legal spend management. Regarding software, no tool handles every aspect of ELM, so it’s best to prioritize the functionality you need and evaluate solutions accordingly.
While internal and external matter management involve handling legal work, they leverage fundamentally different approaches to resource allocation and workflow organization.
Internal matter management leverages the capabilities of the in-house legal team to efficiently handle routine and business-critical work. In contrast, external matter management involves strategically engaging outside counsel for specialized expertise or additional capacity.
Effective legal teams employ a hybrid approach, starting all matters internally for assessment and routing decisions, then engaging external counsel only when specialized knowledge, additional resources, or jurisdictional requirements are necessary.
This strategic balance allows organizations to optimize costs while maintaining quality and ensuring access to the right expertise for every legal challenge.
Most legal departments experience an increase in the volume of legal work, but try to handle that increased workload in-house. They feel pressure to do more with less, with their budgets flat or decreasing. So, whether or not your team has efficient processes in place, you are technically managing matters, but your methods may be working against you.
With this in mind, effective matter management is vital for several reasons:
Streamlined processes lead to more efficient request handling and increased productivity. Time savings allow legal teams to focus on strategic initiatives and handle larger workloads without increasing headcount.
In many organizations, legal teams can seem like a "black box," frustrating lawyers and stakeholders. A clear system and process for tracking and managing legal matters increases visibility and builds trust.
Matter management streamlines communication and collaboration for in-house legal teams by consolidating all comments, documents, and updates within each matter. Team members can easily collaborate internally, and stakeholders can provide input without duplicating efforts.
Smooth legal operations and transparent communication boost the legal department's reputation, earning trust and credibility with internal stakeholders and senior leadership.
Effective matter management gives legal operations the metrics and analytics needed to make informed decisions.
Matter management helps legal departments quantify their contributions, allowing them to secure resources and assert a strategic role by showcasing optimized workflows, reduced turnaround times, and mitigated risks.
All businesses are subject to laws and regulations that require diligent compliance. Matter management processes help the legal team track deadlines, contract renewals, and potential risks closely.
Matter management systems reduce disruption caused by turnover or team member absence by creating a single repository for all matters.
Managing legal matters manually can feel like navigating a storm without a compass. Teams relying on email threads, messaging apps, spreadsheets, and generic task management tools like Asana or Jira often struggle with inefficiencies and a lack of clarity.
These methods create a fragmented legal intake system where information is scattered, priorities are unclear, and critical tasks are easily overlooked.
Manual methods may seem manageable for small teams or simple tasks, but the cracks begin to show as legal operations become complex. Adopting legal technology in a fast-paced business environment isn’t optional; it’s essential.
Unlike manual methods or general-purpose tools, matter management software is designed for the unique needs of legal teams and serves as the corporate legal department’s centralized source of truth.
An effective platform should incorporate request intake and triage, document management, workflow automation, analytics and reporting, collaboration tools, and useful integrations with other tools. Matter management software transforms chaotic workflows into streamlined operations by organizing and tracking all in-house legal work.
In-house legal teams face unique challenges in managing legal matters efficiently and effectively. Adopting best practices in matter management is crucial to navigating these challenges.
A centralized document management system can store critical legal documents and ensure easy retrieval and secure sharing.
For instance, legal teams can utilize modern, cloud-based document management platforms to manage contracts, litigation documents, and compliance materials. These platforms enable team members to seamlessly access and collaborate on the latest documents, regardless of where they are.
Another best practice is integrating workflow automation in legal processes. A 2023 survey by Hyperion Research showed a significant shift in legal departments embracing workflow automation.
Legal workflow automation software like Streamline AI can significantly reduce the time spent on routine, high-volume tasks like contract approvals, document drafting, and compliance checks, resulting in significant cost savings.
For example, a tech company can use automation tools to streamline its sales contract or vendor approval process for contracts over or under a certain dollar threshold. Draft contracts are automatically routed to the relevant parties for review and approval, thereby reducing the turnaround time from several days to a few hours.
This not only increases efficiency but also allows legal professionals to have the time to focus on more strategic tasks, such as advising on complex legal issues or negotiating more critical, high-value contracts.
Data reigns supreme in today’s businesses. Leveraging data is essential for legal teams to inform smarter decision-making.
Software like Streamline AI allows legal teams to gain real-time insight into legal operations processes and trends, such as request volume (over time, by team or type), SLAs, time at each step, or exceptions to thresholds and non-standard terms.
By analyzing this data, legal teams can better forecast workload volume and improve resource planning. The team can develop targeted strategies to mitigate risks or break down bottlenecks through better compliance training or streamlined contract processes.
Incorporating data analytics into matter management enhances efficiency and risk management and transforms the legal department from a reactive service provider into a proactive strategic advisor to the business.
This data-driven approach ensures that legal strategies align with business objectives and that the legal team contributes to the organization's overall success and resilience.
Effective matter management systems share essential features that transform chaotic legal workflows into streamlined operations. Understanding these capabilities helps legal teams evaluate solutions and select platforms that deliver measurable improvements to their operations.
Modern matter management begins with smart intake processes that capture structured request information upfront, eliminating the back-and-forth typically required to understand matter requirements.
Advanced systems automatically route matters to appropriate team members based on expertise, workload, and priority classification, ensuring urgent issues receive immediate attention while routine matters flow efficiently through established workflows.
Streamline AI's intelligent intake system eliminates the chaos of email-based requests, ensuring every matter is captured correctly, classified, and routed from day one.
Effective platforms enable legal teams to design custom workflows that reflect their unique processes and organizational structure. These systems automatically create and assign routine tasks, streamline approval processes with proper oversight controls, and manage critical deadlines with automated tracking and reminders.
The result is significant time savings on administrative work, allowing legal professionals to focus on high-value strategic activities.
With Streamline AI's workflow automation, legal teams can reduce time spent on routine tasks by up to 70%, allowing lawyers to focus on high-value strategic work.
Enterprise-grade document management provides secure cloud storage with role-based access controls, ensuring sensitive legal information remains protected while remaining accessible to authorized team members.
Powerful search functionality across all matter-related documents eliminates the hours spent hunting through email chains and shared drives, while version control automatically tracks document changes and maintains audit trails for compliance.
Real-time dashboards provide live visibility into matter status, team workloads, and performance metrics, enabling legal leaders to make data-driven decisions about resource allocation and process improvements.
Customizable reporting tools serve different stakeholders, from detailed operational metrics for legal operations teams to high-level summaries for executive leadership. Performance tracking capabilities measure matter resolution times, team efficiency, and internal and external legal costs.
Streamline AI's analytics platform provides legal leaders with the data to demonstrate value, optimize resources, and make informed strategic decisions.
Unified communication features eliminate the fragmentation that occurs when legal teams rely on multiple platforms for different aspects of matter management. Built-in messaging and collaboration tools support internal coordination and external counsel integration through secure portals.
Automated progress reports and stakeholder notifications keep everyone informed without requiring manual status updates, while centralized knowledge repositories preserve institutional wisdom and legal precedents.
Seamless integration with existing enterprise tools and databases creates a connected legal ecosystem that eliminates data silos and reduces manual data entry. Modern platforms offer intuitive interfaces that require minimal training for user adoption, while mobile optimization ensures full functionality remains accessible from any device.
Customizable dashboards allow different roles to access the information most relevant to their responsibilities.
Streamline AI integrates with your existing technology stack, creating a connected legal ecosystem that eliminates data silos and improves efficiency.
Robust architecture accommodates growth in matter volumes and team size without compromising performance. Multi-jurisdiction support enables organizations to handle matters across different legal jurisdictions from a single platform, while disaster recovery systems protect critical legal data.
Fast response times and reliable uptime ensure legal teams can access essential information whenever needed.
Matter management entails more than case handling; it’s about optimizing the legal department's efficacy and impact. By understanding its value and adopting best practices, in-house legal teams can significantly improve their operations and strategically contribute to their organizations.
Streamline AI is the intelligent matter management platform that turns your legal department from a reactive service provider into a proactive strategic advisor.
Join hundreds of in-house legal teams who've revolutionized their matter management with Streamline AI. Experience the difference that purpose-built legal technology makes.
Schedule Your Demo and see why legal leaders trust Streamline AI to streamline their operations, reduce costs, and deliver measurable business value.
Matter management offers a holistic view of all legal work (both litigious and non-litigious), focusing on workflow efficiency. Case management dives deep into individual litigation cases, emphasizing court documents, deadlines, and specific case requirements.
Matter management reduces costs by enabling teams to handle more work in-house through improved efficiency, providing better visibility into legal expenses and outside counsel spend, and allowing for more accurate budget forecasting based on comprehensive matter tracking data.
Key features include intelligent intake and triage capabilities, comprehensive workflow automation, centralized document management with security controls, advanced analytics and reporting, collaboration tools, and integration capabilities with existing enterprise systems.
Manual methods using email threads, spreadsheets, and generic task tools create fragmented systems where information is scattered, priorities are unclear, and critical tasks are easily overlooked—problems that compound as legal operations become more complex and volume increases.
Scale your legal team's efficiency and effectiveness with modern workflow automation tools designed for in-house legal.
