What is a Legal Matter?

Keeping track of all the terminology associated with the work of corporate legal departments can be tricky, and so can ensuring that everything runs smoothly. Even with well-defined processes, in-house legal teams often face unexpected disorganization, like matter details being scattered across emails or hidden in various files.

Fortunately, there’s a way to fix this — and it starts with understanding what a legal matter is and how to manage it effectively. Let’s go back to basics with a refresher for everyone on your team: What is a legal matter, and what are its core components?

What is a Legal Matter?

Broadly speaking, legal matters are events, issues, or situations that require active work by the legal department to resolve. That differentiates them from legal service requests, which can often be resolved very quickly.

For example, firing off an email to answer a colleague’s question about visa requirements or legal issues pertaining to an NDA represents a legal service request, while providing detailed legal assistance to a colleague to help them obtain that visa would be considered a legal matter.

Legal matters also have a defined start and end point and an objective associated with them — whether it’s acquiring a new business or registering a new patent.

In short, whatever the task is, it’s something that requires your legal team’s ongoing attention and involves a series of communications, documents, and legal requirements that need to be managed and completed.

The 7 Key Components of a Legal Matter

As the above definition shows, there’s a lot of ground to cover when it comes to what’s included in legal matters. But some factors are common to them all, including:

• Key matter details
• Key contacts
• Documentation
• Tasks
• Deadlines
• Updates
• Spend

Key matter details

For every legal matter, there is a set of important details that need to be tracked (and kept on hand by any team members involved) to ensure things proceed smoothly. These include a brief description of the matter, the business function it relates to, an assessment of the complexity and risk involved, relevant jurisdictional details, and the area of law it pertains to (e.g., intellectual property, contract law, etc.).

To keep things moving along smoothly, all that information should be centralized and readily available to anyone involved in the matter.

Key contacts

Next, key contacts should be listed for your matter. These include:

• A matter lead: The internal team member handling the matter for your company and
• Outside counsel: Key points of contact within legal firms contracted outside the company

Establishing key contacts makes it much easier for anyone on your team (or any member of outside counsel) to follow up on details or report progress. That’s because it helps them know exactly who they should be talking to, which in turn contributes to getting the matter resolved quickly and efficiently.

Documentation

For every legal matter, your team will also need to stay on top of a range of documents — and even the most straightforward matters can generate a surprising amount of paperwork. That might include everything from contracts and filings to correspondence, agreements, tax documentation, and more.

Those documents need to be tracked, accessible to the relevant team members, and, in some cases, updated throughout the matter. There can also be legal and regulatory implications regarding how data and documents are handled, making it extra essential to have a reliable document management system in place for document storage and management.

Tasks

Just like the piles of paperwork involved, legal matters generate a ton of tasks that need to be followed up or completed by legal professionals. Those range from a simple phone call to drafting a contract or conducting due diligence on that shiny new property purchase.

The good news is that the actual workflows involved are often formulaic, with set tasks that should be completed before the matter can move forward. But of course, that also means things can get held up if someone drops the ball, which is why it’s so important to make sure the status of tasks is accurately tracked.

Deadlines

For most legal matters, there are critical deadlines that must be met to stay compliant with contractual obligations, regulations, agreements, and court schedules. Missing those deadlines can come with serious repercussions, especially when it comes to legal and financial penalties. Not to mention potential reputational harm to your company.

Keeping track of deadlines in a centralized system is an excellent way to minimize those risks while also making sure everyone on the team has access to the latest information and timeline.

Updates

Regular progress reports and updates are a vital part of keeping a legal matter moving along smoothly. They also prevent unnecessary delays in finalizing a deal or moving a case forward. In most cases, the flow of those updates would be from the outside counsel engaged on the matter to the lead internal attorney, who would then pass along all updates to legal leadership on a periodic basis (e.g., monthly). But depending on the matter at hand, there might be several other stakeholders to update as well, e.g., members of other business teams.

Keeping all relevant parties updated is an essential part of ensuring progress, and that risks, are adequately managed. But that can be a lot to keep track of, so setting up a system to create alerts or automatic updates can be a valuable way to keep everyone appraised.

Spend

Finally, it’s essential to make sure the internal and external team members handling each matter stay on top of costs, so your team can keep things on a budget. That includes the in-house attorney(s) managing a matter, their practice area leads, and any outside council involved.

Legal spending trends have fluctuated, but in 2023, the average legal spending among companies surged by a notable 29%, highlighting the growing financial pressures on in-house teams to maintain budgets and track key metrics.

So, what constitutes legal spend? It can include a number of factors, but the big-ticket items tend to be fees associated with external counsel and alternative legal service providers (ASLPs). Those fees should be accurately tracked and managed to ensure your budget is being spent appropriately.

What is Legal Matter Management? And Why Does It Matter?

Okay, so clearly, there’s a theme here. Handling legal matters effectively means keeping track of and updating all the different components and making sure they’re visible and accessible to all parties involved.

Sounds easy on paper. However, as organizations and legal teams grow, the task of keeping track of multiple matters gets exponentially more complicated. Especially if your data isn’t centralized. Which is why so many corporate legal teams are turning to matter management software.

Matter management software provides a centralized repository for details of individual matters and a way to monitor the workings and efficiency of your in-house counsel.

The benefits of excellent matter management software include improved efficiency, better visibility into individual matters and team resourcing, and optimized workflows. Ideally, your chosen legal technology solution should also offer:

• Robust automation features to replace, speed up, or enhance manual workflows by stripping out the most repetitive and tedious tasks, including automating legal reporting
• Intuitive dashboards and displays so that anyone on the team can access a real-time overview of each matter — including details like spend, outside counsel involvement, and internal resources dedicated to the matter
• Centralized task and document management to make it easier for team members to access the latest information on a matter and collaborate on moving it forward

With all those features in place, moving things forward on individual matters becomes a breeze. There’s no more digging through random spreadsheets and files to find the legal documents or facts you need. Better still, you get clear insights into what’s making a real operational difference in your team. As well as how processes, workflows, and reporting can be improved to streamline things even further.

Matter Management vs. Case Management

A final point to keep in mind is that while legal matter management software is tailored to in-house corporate needs, you may come across other software tools used in legal contexts as well. One of the most common is case management software.

The key difference is that case management tools are typically used by law firms to facilitate the handling of details and documentation associated with specific legal cases.

Matter management is a much broader solution. One geared towards handling all the details and nuance that comes from dealing with your company’s in-house legal matters. As discussed above, that means matter management deals with workflows, key contacts, tasks and deadlines — as well as all the paperwork associated with specific legal matters.

A Better Approach to Matter Management with Brightflag

As legal teams grow, so do their matter management needs. And even the best teams need a little help keeping their legal work efficient, organized, and on-task.

With Brightflag’s legal matter management system, that job becomes a lot easier. Our platform acts as your command center for legal matters, ensuring essential matter information, documents, spending details, and deadlines are easily accessible in one centralized location.

If that sounds like it might be the solution you’re looking for, book a demo to learn more. And let our team show you just how straightforward matter management can be.