Why In-House Teams Need a Legal Matter Tracker

A small but crucial detail slips through the cracks, turning a simple task—like finding the latest update about work on a matter or meeting a deadline—into a major headache. Sound familiar?

The truth for many corporate legal departments is that no matter how well-defined their processes are, if legal matters aren’t accurately tracked, these kinds of mistakes can quickly occur.

At best, poor matter tracking may mean extra time spent searching for details scattered across emails, messages, and drives. At worst, it introduces unnecessary risk, causes costly delays, and tarnishes legal’s brand with the rest of the business.

How are in-house teams solving this challenge? By turning to centralized solutions, like legal matter trackers. In this blog, we run through how legal matter tracking software works and why it’s essential for keeping legal matters organized and ensuring they’re handled with due efficiency.

What is a Legal Matter Tracker?

A legal matter tracker—sometimes called a matter management solution—is software designed specifically to help in-house legal teams manage their matters from start to finish. That includes keeping track of details such as the different stakeholders involved in each matter, the latest status updates, complete and incomplete tasks, and upcoming deadlines.

By centralizing that information, in-house legal teams move away from the chaos of having matter details distributed across several software solutions—or even across multiple spreadsheets and emails.

Matter-tracking solutions like Brightflag manage the entire lifecycle of a case—from intake and workflow management to resource allocation and resolution. This ensures matters move forward efficiently.

How Does Matter Tracking Software Work?

The core of matter management software is centralization, standardization, and visibility. By collecting matter details in a single location, matter trackers make it much easier for everyone across the in-house team to find, access, and categorize the information they need to move matters forward.

Good matter tracking software also includes options for workflow optimization and automation, making it easier to ensure repetitive tasks are completed the same way and correctly every time.

For example, instead of needing to pull data from multiple systems to create reports about matters, like manually updated spreadsheets and your accounts payable system, you can use your matter-tracking software’s dashboards to get immediate insight into what work is ongoing, how much it costs, and what progress has been made towards completion.

What Are the Key Benefits of a Legal Matter Tracker?

From the above, it’s evident that matter trackers give the legal team, and especially leadership, unprecedented visibility into matters in progress and the legal department’s overall workload. But there are a number of other key benefits as well:

Time savings and streamlined processes

In a world where corporate legal teams must constantly adapt to new expectations, changing requirements, and growing workloads, matter trackers help to eliminate the inefficiencies that slow teams down. Not only do they streamline how matter information is handled and stored, but they also make it easier to access relevant details and get updates on how matters are progressing. All of this means your team spends less time searching for information, and fewer emails are flying back and forth to clarify where things stand.

Better resourcing

Having apparent oversight of all the work in progress makes it much easier for legal department leadership to manage the team’s workload. It also helps ensure that resources are being appropriately allocated to the most critical and urgent tasks. Legal matter trackers also provide insight into which departments or teams are sending the most work and enable team leadership to resource appropriately in response.

For example, suppose GC sees a spike in patent registration work coming from the product department. In that case, they can use the data from a matter tracker to justify increasing the budget to hire a new paralegal to handle the extra workload. Or, they can start looking for cost-effective outside help (like hiring an alternative legal service provider) to improve spend management.

Improved information governance

Using a legal matter tracker makes it easy for in-house teams to manage and store data in accordance with regulations and data security best practices. That includes enforcing data compliance and only granting role-based access to data, as appropriate.

Better collaboration

A single system for tracking matters keeps everyone—both in-house team members and outside counsel law firms—on the same page. With a centralized space for updates and reviews, collaboration becomes more efficient, reducing confusion about the next steps and minimizing scope creep. An added benefit is that this often improves relationships with law firms outside vendors as well because there are fewer delays and guesswork involved in moving matters forward.

Enhanced reporting & analytics

Most legal tracking tools come with reporting and analytics functionality, improving the in-house team’s ability to perform forecasting, and adding to the visibility leadership has into legal matters while empowering them to make data-driven decisions.

That real-time visibility is especially valuable in high-stakes moments. For example, if GC is in a meeting with the CEO and gets asked for an update on a major litigation case, they can’t afford to say, “I don’t know.” Using a matter tracker—preferably one that provides on-demand insights like Brightflag’s Matter Updates—ensures they have instant access to the latest status on any matter.

How to Choose a Legal Matter Tracker

By now, you should have a clearer idea of what a legal matter tracker’s use cases are, and what it can do for your team. But what should you consider when choosing one? Start by evaluating how a matter tracker fits into your existing legal tech stack.

The best options are platforms that either easily support integrations with existing tech, or that already combine everything you need in a single package (e.g., a matter-tracking solution that’s directly embedded within your e-billing system).

Why does that level of integration matter? Because it provides your team with a much more cohesive overview of the relationship between matters and legal spend. Combining e-billing and matter management makes it easy to track spend by matter, internal department, or vendor. That, in turn, makes it easier to monitor the budget and make informed outsourcing decisions.

Ideally, you also want a system that acts as a single point of truth, with all of your matter data housed in the same place. Suppose you’re using tech that requires you to duplicate data between multiple systems. In that case, you increase the risk of mistakes and remove the benefit of a streamlined, easy-to-access central repository.

In summary, when evaluating matter trackers, look for solutions that:

• Eliminate information silos and centralize your matter data
• Either offer a complete package right out of the box or give you the tools and functionality you need to integrate your existing solutions.

Better Legal Matter Tracking with Brightflag

At Brightflag, we’ve built our legal matter-tracking solution with all the above principles in mind. Our integrated e-billing and matter management platform gives legal teams and leadership a single source of truth—ensuring complete visibility, centralized access, and granular insights into all matter and legal spend data.

Brightflag provides a comprehensive set of legal matter management tools as part of our enterprise legal management solution, including key features like advanced reporting, AI-driven insights, and workflow automation, helping in-house legal teams operate more efficiently.

Ready to improve your legal operations and transform the way you manage legal work and spend? Book a demo with us today to learn more.