Guide to Matter Management
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For in-house legal teams of growing organizations, increasing workloads and high pressure to deliver value can make scalability a challenge. How do you manage it all while avoiding errors and protecting your team from burnout?
The answer is: Matter Management Software.
This tool is designed to support legal professionals by centralizing matters, automating tasks, and providing real-time insights. The result? Greater efficiency, a more motivated legal team, and clearer ways to demonstrate value to leadership.
Benefits of Matter Management Software
Matter management software delivers significant advantages for in-house legal teams, addressing core challenges and enabling more efficient and strategic operations.
With matter management software, legal teams can:
- Track matters in real time, ensuring clear visibility into matter progress and deadlines.
- Automate workflows, such as task assignments and approvals, to save time and reduce errors.
- Create a single source of truth by drawing documents, requests, and communications for matters from different sources and storing them in one place
- Automatically generate reports to demonstrate team performance and highlight bottlenecks.
1. Enhanced Efficiency
Matter management software automates repetitive tasks such as request intake, document creation, and contract approvals. By reducing the administrative burden, legal teams can focus their time more on high-value strategic work.
2. Improved Visibility and Reporting
With a centralized system for matter management, as well as tools like dashboards and analytics, GCs and CLOs gain real-time insights into workloads, deadlines, and performance. This visibility enables better decision-making and allows teams to demonstrate their contributions to organizational goals.
3. Streamlined Collaboration
Clients from other parts of the business can submit requests for legal matters through any channel — such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, or email — and they’ll be automatically routed into the system for legal professionals to view, track, and progress. The assigned lawyers can then collaborate on matters with ease, directly from the platform.
4. Scalability
As workloads grow, legal department software adapts to meet demand. Customizable workflows, pre-populated forms, and automation tools allow teams to handle increasing legal matters without hiring more human resources.
Matter Management Software Use Cases
Implementing matter management software can significantly enhance the efficiency and impact of in-house legal teams. Key use cases include:
- Legal FAQ & Helpdesk: Centralizes responses to common legal inquiries, ensuring consistent and accessible information for employees.
- Contract Management: Streamlines the creation, review, and approval processes, reducing turnaround times and minimizing errors.
- Compliance Tracking: Monitors regulatory requirements and internal policies, helping the organization maintain compliance and mitigate risks.
- Litigation Management: Organizes case information, deadlines, and communications, facilitating effective management of legal disputes.
- Intellectual Property Management: Tracks IP assets, renewal dates, and related documentation, safeguarding the organization's intellectual property rights.
- Reporting & Analytics: Provides insights into legal operations, enabling data-driven decision-making and demonstrating the legal team's value to stakeholders.
Example: Benefits of Matter Management Software for Woolworths
An example to illustrate the benefits of this in-house legal department software in action is Woolworths Group — one of Australia’s largest retailers. Managing legal operations across brands like Woolworths Supermarkets, BIG W, and Dan Murphy's, the company faced challenges with high volumes of manual, repetitive work and inconsistent service delivery.
By adopting Checkbox’s matter management software, Woolworths achieved transformative results:
- Reduced manual, repetitive work by up to 80%, allowing the legal team to focus on complex and strategic tasks.
- Automated over 60 workflows across the legal function, streamlining processes like approvals, triage, and routine advice.
- Developed a scalable service delivery model, combining intake and triage automation with self-service tools to provide faster, standardized legal advice.
These results demonstrate how matter management software enables legal teams to work more efficiently, scale their operations, and deliver consistent, high-quality service across their organizations.
Want to learn more about in-house legal software or matter management software?
Book a call with one of our technology consultants or check out Checkbox’s interactive demo to see how we can support your team.
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