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As legal requests multiply and contract volumes rise, many legal departments realize they need better systems to manage their work. That’s where matter management and contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions come in.
But once the need is clear, a bigger question often follows: Should we build our own tool tailored to our workflows, or buy a solution off the shelf?
It’s a fair question and the answer isn’t always black and white. Building internally may seem like the flexible, cost-effective route, while buying can feel faster but potentially rigid.
However, today’s no-code legal operations platforms like Checkbox offer a new, hybrid approach: the power to fully customize your workflows without starting from scratch or leaning on IT for every update.
Let’s explore the pros and cons of each path and why more legal teams are choosing to take the hybrid approach for better control, efficiency, and scalability.
What Is a Matter Management & CLM Solution?
A matter management solution helps legal teams centralize, track, and manage all legal work from intake and triage, to task assignment, collaboration, and reporting. It gives visibility into who’s doing what, what’s urgent, and what has potentially been missed in the past.
A contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution focuses specifically on managing contracts across every stage from drafting and review to approval, execution, and renewal. It ensures contracts move quickly, stay compliant, and don’t get lost in inboxes.
While these tools solve different challenges, they often work best together. Combined in one platform, they provide a single source of truth for legal that improves efficiency, transparency, and the ability to scale.
Comparing Build vs. Buy: Matter Management & CLM Solutions
When evaluating legal tech, most teams start with the question: Do we build something in-house or buy a ready-made solution?
Building from Scratch
Building a matter management and CLM solution internally offers full control. You can tailor every workflow, form, and report to your team’s exact needs. But that customization comes with tradeoffs. These include long development timelines, ongoing IT dependencies, and mounting maintenance costs. What starts as a solution often becomes a project in itself.
Buying a Software Solution
Buying an off-the-shelf matter management and CLM solution delivers speed and structure. You gain access to proven features, vendor support, and regular updates. But many tools are built to serve broad use cases, not necessarily the unique way your legal team operates. That can lead to workarounds, lower adoption, and limited long-term value.
The Hybrid Approach
Legal ops teams don’t have to choose between flexibility and simplicity. In-house legal software solutions like Checkbox offer a third option: a hybrid approach that combines the best of both worlds. In other words, it’s an off-the-shelf option with full flexibility to customize the software your unique needs without IT overhead.
As a no-code platform, Checkbox empowers legal teams to design and manage their own workflows from intake and triage, to contract review and reporting. With drag-and-drop tools, you can visually map workflows in an intuitive way which eliminates the need for coding knowledge or engineering support.
You get the speed and reliability of buying, with the deep configurability you’d expect from building.
Key Features That Balance Customization & Simplicity
Legal matter management software solutions like Checkbox give legal teams complete control without adding complexity. Here are a few core features that make it possible:
🫳 Drag-and-Drop Workflow Automation
Design end-to-end legal workflows using an intuitive, no-code builder. From approvals to escalations, every step is configurable by legal ops themselves. This means lawyers can launch and update processes on their own, adapting quickly as business needs evolve.
📊 Tailored Dashboards & Real-Time Reporting
Real-time matter dashboards that allow you to track matters, contracts, and team performance can be customized to show the metrics that matter most. For example, you can configure your dashboard by selecting custom widgets that display insights on cycle times, workloads, or volume by business unit.
🔌 Custom Integrations
Tools like Checkbox connect with tools like email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, SharePoint, and more. This ensures legal stays embedded in the business’s existing workflows and eliminates the need for legal ops to constantly update their tools by hand.
Key Takeaways: Why Choose Between Build & Buy?
For today’s legal teams, the question isn’t just build vs. buy. It’s about choosing a solution that enables speed, flexibility, and long-term scalability.
Building in-house may offer control, but it often drains time and resources. Buying off-the-shelf may speed up implementation, but can limit adaptability. Checkbox offers the best of both worlds: a no-code platform purpose-built for legal, combining speed and reliability with full control and customization.
Want to see how Checkbox can help you launch fast, adapt easily, and scale confidently without the IT backlog or budget blowout? Book a demo today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I balance customization needs with cost when choosing build vs buy for CLM?
Building offers full customization but often leads to higher long-term costs in development, IT support, and maintenance. Buying a no-code solution like Checkbox gives you flexibility without the overhead.
Can no-code legal platforms meet complex enterprise requirements?
Yes, advanced no-code in-house legal platforms like Checkbox are built to handle complex, enterprise-grade workflows, compliance requirements, and integrations. They empower legal teams to manage sophisticated processes without relying on developers.
What are the hidden risks of building my own matter management system?
In-house systems often suffer from lack of scalability, undocumented logic, and dependency on internal teams that may shift priorities. Over time, they can become brittle, outdated, and difficult to maintain without significant resources.
How quickly can a vendor-provided CLM adapt to my company's growth?
Modern CLM platforms are built to scale, allowing legal teams to update processes, automate new workflows, and onboard new teams without custom code or vendor wait times. This agility is critical in high-growth environments.
Is the ongoing maintenance of an in-house solution worth the initial savings?
While the upfront cost may seem lower, ongoing maintenance such as bugs, updates, and feature requests, can quickly outweigh the savings. Most legal teams find that the hidden costs of upkeep make off-the-shelf platforms more efficient long-term.
How does buying a CLM reduce legal compliance risks compared to building one?
Vendor-provided CLMs come with built-in safeguards, access controls, and audit trails designed for compliance from the start. With ongoing updates and support, they help legal teams stay ahead of regulatory requirements without custom development.