Your legal team spends 300+ hours a month manually reviewing contracts. Outside counsel bills you $250/hour for work that should cost $150/hour. Critical deadlines get missed because someone forgot to track a signature. That’s not just frustrating, it’s costing your company millions.
This is the reality for General Counsel at companies of all sizes. While legal operations tools exist to fix these problems, most teams either:
- Buy the wrong software (and waste a lot of money on features they don’t even use).
- Fear change and stick with slow, expensive manual processes. They don’t update their software.
- Skip training, leaving tools underutilized.
The truth is that Legal operations technology isn’t about replacing lawyers. It’s about freeing them from paperwork and stress so they can focus on real legal strategies and their clients. MatterSuite offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to address these very challenges.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- How to identify which legal operations software solves your team’s top 3 headaches, with a focus on how MatterSuite can help.
- The automated legal operations tools delivering ROI (Return on Investment) with real examples, showcasing MatterSuite’s capabilities.
- How to get your legal operations team onboard with new systems and software, leveraging MatterSuite’s user-friendly approach.
Why Legal Ops Tools Matter for General Counsel
The problem: Manual contract review consumes 15+ hours/week per lawyer. That’s 60 hours/month lost to repetitive tasks like redlining clauses and chasing signatures.
The solution: MatterSuite’s AI-powered tools can reduce this to 2 hours while catching 30% more errors. MatterSuite also prioritizes high-risk clauses and has version control that tracks all changes in a single dashboard. This directly translates to significant time savings and enhanced accuracy for your legal team.
Data-Driven Decisions: From Guesswork to Granular Control
The problem: Most General Counsels admit they can’t track basic metrics like which practice areas burn the most budget, how long matters sit with outside counsel, or which vendors are over-billing. Without these insights, strategic planning is based on intuition instead of evidence, leading to suboptimal resource allocation and difficulty in demonstrating the legal department’s value.
The solution: MatterSuite’s legal ops tools provide a real-time dashboard showing:
- Spend by Matter Type (e.g., Litigation vs. Compliance).
- Attorney Productivity: Matters closed per lawyer/month.
- Vendor Performance: Outside counsel fee deviations.
These data insights transform your legal department from a cost center into a strategic business partner, capable of providing evidence-based recommendations and demonstrating quantifiable value to the executive team, all powered by MatterSuite.
Competitive Advantage: The Silent Weapon in Mergers and Acquisitions and Beyond
The problem: In a competitive market, manual processes can lead to missed deadlines (e.g., option exercise windows, regulatory filings), inconsistent risk assessments across deals, and slower closings than tech-savvy competitors. Delays and inaccuracies can lead to lost opportunities, unfavorable deal terms, or even failed transactions. The inability to rapidly assess legal risks and opportunities during due diligence puts a company at a significant disadvantage.
The solution: MatterSuite’s automation capabilities let you:
- Standardize playbooks across all business units.
- Auto-generate 80% of routine NDAs/DPAs.
- Flag unusual terms in acquisition agreements.
By leveraging these capabilities, your legal department becomes an enabler of business growth, accelerating deal cycles, mitigating risks, and directly contributing to your company’s strategic goals and overall competitive edge – all seamlessly supported by MatterSuite.
The 5 Legal Ops Tools Every General Counsel Should Evaluate
Choosing the right legal operations tools isn’t about buying the most expensive or feature-rich software. It’s about strategically selecting solutions that address your department’s specific pain points and deliver measurable ROI. MatterSuite offers a comprehensive, integrated solution that often encompasses many of these functionalities. Here are five categories of tools every General Counsel should evaluate, keeping in mind how MatterSuite addresses these needs:
Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) Software:
What it does: CLM software handles the full contract lifecycle, from authoring and negotiation to signing, management, and renewal. It puts all contract information in one place, automates processes, and gives visibility into contractual commitments and risks. MatterSuite includes robust CLM capabilities as a core part of its offering.
E-Billing and Spend Management Systems:
These systems software offer a single platform for the management of all legal bills from external counsel and other suppliers. They impose billing policies, automate approval and review of invoices, and provide detailed analytics on legal expenditure. MatterSuite incorporates comprehensive e-billing and spend management functionalities.
Matter Management System:
Matter management systems centralize all information related to legal cases, projects, or “matters.” This includes documents, communications, deadlines, tasks, and budgets, providing a single source of truth for every legal undertaking. MatterSuite is fundamentally a robust matter management platform.
Legal Research & Knowledge Management Platforms:
Software like MatterSuite includes traditional legal research databases, offering advanced search capabilities, AI-powered insights, and tools for internal knowledge sharing and precedent management.
Workflow Automation & Process Tools:
These solutions enable legal teams to create, automate, and track intricate legal processes that cross systems and stakeholders. They’re less document-management-oriented and more about facilitating the flow of information and approvals. MatterSuite excels in offering robust workflow automation capabilities across its various modules.
How to Build a Legal Ops Team for Success: Building Your Legal Ops Dream Team
You’ve seen the hype surrounding legal operations tools, and maybe you’re even testing out solutions like MatterSuite. But no matter how advanced the software is, it’s only as good as the people operating it. Spending money on technology with no solid, well-organized legal operations team is like purchasing a Formula 1 car and then neglecting to hire a pit crew.
Many General Counsel recognize the need for legal ops, but struggle with the “how”:
- Who should be on this team?
- What skills do they need?
- How do we integrate them effectively?
And most importantly, how do we ensure they don’t just manage software, but truly drive strategic value for the legal department and the wider business?
Why a Dedicated Legal Ops Team is a Necessity, Not a Luxury
In today’s corporate world, legal departments are facing extreme pressures. Beyond the traditional legal work, General Counselors are expected to manage budgets, mitigate enterprise-wide risks, leverage data for strategic decision-making, and do more with less. This expanded mandate makes a dedicated legal operations function indispensable.
Constructing your dream legal ops team takes a combination of operations, technical expertise, and insight into legal department requirements. The precise organization will vary based on your company size, budget, and level of legal function maturity.
Conclusion: Wise Next Steps for General Counsels
The corporate legal landscape is changing, and being competitive requires embracing efficiency, data, and smart operations. Spending money on a robust legal operations platform like MatterSuite is an important first step, but it’s only half the solution. The other half is building an effective and talented legal operations team, your Legal Ops Dream Team, to fully realize the full potential of your technology.
By recognizing the most important tools at your disposal and the roles critical for operational success, you’re poised to turn your law department into a strategic force to be reckoned with. Don’t purchase software; create the infrastructure and the staff to get the most out of it. Your company’s future, not to mention your own peace of mind, is counting on it.
