What is Matter Management? A Comprehensive Guide

When all your processes for legal matter management run smoothly, it feels like magic. Your matter intake process is consistent. Your reporting is clear and accurate. Information is stored securely and finance is happy.

But if one component of your system gets out of sync, it can create delays, introduce risk, and cause a lot of frustration for you, your outside counsel, and your internal business stakeholders.

Effective legal matter management requires intentional processes and systems to guide a matter from intake to analysis and to get you the data you need to continuously improve. Here is what you need to know about legal matter management and its eight critical components:

What is Matter Management?

Matter management refers to the processes, practices, and tools legal professionals use to oversee and handle legal matters, meaning cases or projects. It encompasses a wide range of activities and responsibilities, including tracking key matter information, document management, and task management.

Matter management differs from billing management, but matter management often goes hand-in-hand with outside counsel billing. Handling both is key to legal department efficiency and cost control.

Legal matter management lets you handle every matter from the moment work begins until it is closed. For the best results, all eight components must work together.

1. Matter Initiation and Classification

When the in-house team receives a new request from the business for legal services, they must address that request for urgency and complexity and then assign it to the appropriate team or individual. Correct intake and classification set the foundation for how a matter will be handled throughout its lifecycle, including how the matter’s analyzed after closing it.

When the request includes the appropriate details on complexity, you can make sure to allocate the proper resources. But without a standardized intake process, progress can stall while the team reevaluates resources and potentially reassigns the matter.

Requests for legal services can come from several different places — Slack, email, or over the phone. Without a single system for matter intake, this can lead to missed projects and your team feeling overwhelmed.

Best Practices for Implementation

Try to minimize the number of ways employees can request legal services. Funnel requests toward a specific intake form or channel. Also, standardize the information legal needs upfront to assign the work effectively so you get what you need without a lot of back and forth.

Project management tool Asana recommends including a question on your intake form about the business goal the project aligns to, which can help you better prioritize when all requests come through as “high priority.”

2. Workflow Optimization

Workflows are repetitive processes you need to do on a regular basis, like opening a litigation matter. Without the right systems (or when processes are poorly defined), workflows can be time-consuming and manual, causing frustration and potential errors.

But with efficient and well-defined workflows and systems that can optimize them, you can standardize processes for different types of legal matters. That standardization improves compliance, accuracy, and effectiveness for your in-house team.

Workflow automation and optimization allow for greater standardization and efficiency, such as ensuring litigation matters always have the same information captured during matter opening, like opposing counsel and the project settlement amount. Ensuring this information is captured at matter intake improves reporting and reduces time spent searching for important information down the line.

Best Practices for Implementation

Identify manual and time-consuming tasks that slow down your workflows. Communicate to your team why these processes need to be updated and clearly define how the process should work. For example, implement matter templates to ensure you automatically capture all relevant matter information for each category of work during intake.

3. Resource Allocation

By effectively tracking the complexity of your matters and your attorney workload, you can ensure your internal and external resources are allocated appropriately. Unclear or incomplete resource allocation tracking can cost you unnecessary spending and wasted time. You may not realize resources would be better spent in different ways, and your in-house team may be either over- or under-utilized.

With a clear understanding of your workload, you can get granular on resource allocation to ensure you aren’t stretching your in-house team too thin. With a holistic picture of your matter management, you can ensure you are instructing appropriate matters to outside counsel and recognizing a need for an ALSP or additional staff. Gartner predicts a short-term rise in ALSPs as innovative technologies enter the market, providing more options for low-cost resource allocation.

Best Practices for Implementation

Build and regularly review reports on how you allocate internal and external resources across matters. Spend time each month with these reports to recognize outliers and catch issues early. Incorporate historical data to understand cyclical trends in your department’s workload and how that will impact your current allocation and future planning.

4. Collaboration

Strong collaboration with your outside counsel keeps matters moving efficiently and improves vendor relationships. In contrast, poor collaboration slows down progress, leads to scope creep, and creates confusion between stakeholders about what needs to be done, when, and by whom.

A study by Microsoft found​ the average employee spends 57% of their time communicating. Because of unnecessary emails, phone calls, and meetings, many people struggle to find uninterrupted time for focused work.

Good collaboration around legal matter management starts with a single place to collect and access status updates from outside counsel and for them to upload work for review. Having one place to go for this information from outside counsel breaks down silos and makes sure information isn’t stuck in someone’s inbox.

Legal matters have many moving parts and can involve a lot of unnecessary email back-and-forth or status updates. According to project management company Asana, leaders lose 3.6 hours each week to unnecessary meetings. By streamlining your communication with outside counsel, you can eliminate the need for a phone call or virtual check-in.

Best Practices for Implementation

While facilitating clear communication is important, avoid overcommunicating or sharing sensitive information. Your collaboration tool should provide granular controls on what information and documentation your outside counsel can access. This control ensures the vendors only see what is pertinent to the matters they are working on.

5. Reporting and Analytics

Once you have accurate and accessible data, you can use it to drive your decision-making and improve your operations. Drilling into your matter management reporting helps you improve your internal processes, vendor relationships, and the perception of the legal department in the overall organization.

However, many legal departments miss out on the benefit of in-depth analysis of their legal operations. According to the CLOC 2021 State of the Industry Survey, 84% of respondents said data analytics was part of their legal operations responsibilities, but over 50% rated their department’s maturity in data analytics as developing (one or two on a five-point scale).

Good matter management incorporates analytics through a variety of reports, such as the status and risk score of ongoing matters. You can use reports to understand the workload for internal resources, such as matters per attorney and the types of work you’re instructing to outside counsel. This information will help you understand and improve your resourcing profile.

Best Practices for Implementation

You need to be able to pull reports such as matter cycle time, matters per business unit, and matters per attorney to understand your performance and your progress toward your legal department KPIs.

6. Risk Mitigation

Advances in technology provide exciting opportunities for your business–and new potential legal liabilities. For example, organizations are seeing increased litigation around website tracking and analytics, from chatbots recording conversations to tracking pixels following consumers around the internet.

In-house lawyers are trained to recognize and mitigate potential risks, whether a contract includes a problematic loophole or a marketing promotion includes the appropriate disclaimers. Effective matter management helps attorneys mitigate risk by providing tools to score matters based on risk, establish a risk profile, and identify trends.

Risk scoring can help you understand which parts of your business are driving legal requests. It’s difficult, however, to always be proactive about risk mitigation. Your in-house legal department might not know about organizational changes that may drive a legal matter until an employee submits the intake form.
Best Practices for Implementation

Track a risk and complexity score for each legal matter submitted to your in-house team. Use these scores to help you keep track of current risks and identify trends in potential issues. If your general counsel notices an uptick in product-related litigation, for example, you may need a representative from the legal department to participate more closely in the development process.

7. Information Governance

Information governance refers to the policies and processes used to manage legal data. Effective legal matter management includes properly gathering, storing, accessing, updating, and deleting information related to matters, whether stored in documents, emails, or metadata.

Corporations are increasingly targeted by bad actors, making it crucial for in-house teams to securely manage their data. In July, hackers accessed more than 1 TB of data from Disney’s Slack messages, including information on unreleased projects. According to TechCrunch, the first half of 2024 saw data breaches that gave hackers access to more than 1 billion records.

Good information governance removes silos, ensuring those who need access to specific documentation can find it instead of important documents living on someone’s drive or email inbox. It also enforces compliance by requiring staff to follow standard privacy regulations so proprietary or personal data stays secure.

Implementing strong information governance can be difficult if you don’t know what data you already have. It’s hard to classify and secure data if you don’t know where it’s located or what format it’s in. That’s why it’s best to leverage a matter management system as your key source of information on legal matters, status updates, and documentation. You also need a system with role-based access so people can only see the information they need to do their jobs.

Best Practices for Implementation

Clarify the types of information you store and where it’s stored. Create or update your internal controls documentation to outline your organization’s governance standards. Use your legal tech, in particular your matter management system, to manage and enforce your information governance.

8. Technology

Implementing and integrating legal technology will help you create a seamless matter management system that supports your data, document, and collaboration goals.

The right legal matter management technology will help unlock your data, create efficiencies, decrease costs, and improve compliance. Instead of cobbling together different pieces of the matter management process that don’t talk to each other, find tools that integrate. The right tools will scale to meet the needs of your in-house team as you take on different types of matters and add new team members.

When the in-house team at Dropbox was looking to upgrade their legal spend and matter management technology, they had three primary goals: cut down the manual data entry of their AP team, get better visibility into their legal spend, and save time. With one system and seamless integrations, they cut their matter intake from 10 minutes each to less than a minute.

Different tools that require manual data exports and imports increase the chances of errors and security risks. Without a central matter management system, your team is more likely to miss deadlines and status updates get buried in someone’s inbox.

Best Practices for Implementation

Find a tool that you can customize to track key data points specific to your business and the different matters you handle most often. Confirm data integration options, such as secure FTP and APIs. Look closely at reporting capabilities, including which reports and dashboards come standard and how easy it is to build more bespoke reports.

A More Balanced In-House Team with Effective Matter Management

With the right legal matter management system, legal teams can transform routine tasks and data entry into actionable insights. You’ll have the reporting and automated workflows to improve your team’s workload, improve morale, and avoid burnout.

If you’re struggling to enhance your management capabilities, learn how Brightflag’s matter management software might fit your team, and book a demo today.