Legal departments often face complexities from struggling with multiple stakeholders, staying compliant with legal regulations, or managing ever-growing matters efficiently. All of these have become one of the biggest challenges for in-house legal teams.
The problems may be the same, but the solution can be customized as per the needs of the legal department. In this blog, we’ll discuss the common challenges of legal matter management for in-house teams and explore how teams have overcome these by simple means.
Let’s first have a gist on what matter management is!!
What is Matter Management?
The legal matter management basically is organising all data, documents, bills, contacts, and communication related to a specific legal matter.
The software helps legal teams in managing matters, tracking budget and expense, managing documents, conducting legal research, drafting contracts, and streamlining communication between client and co-counsel portals. The primary goal of the matter management process is to streamline the workflow; it provides insights and makes processes more efficient, helping the legal departments.
Overcoming the Top Matter Management Challenges Legal Teams Face
Legal teams deal with various matters, leading to scattered documents, missed deadlines, and chaotic workflows. To tackle these, the teams are shifting towards smart alternatives. Let’s discuss in detail the challenges in matter management and its alternative solutions in-house teams are using to face them.
Keeping Files and Emails Organized: A Constant Challenge
Handling a variety of matters leads to lots of files, contracts, briefs, notes, fragmented intakes, and more. When all these documents are stored in different places like your inbox, shared drives, etc., finding the right information can be a hassle.
How Matter Management Software Transforms Document Organization
The software centralized all the documents, emails under one roof with its cloud-based storage, and it also provides:
- Tagging, versioning, and advanced search simplify file organization and retrieval.
- Linking emails to matter records removes silos and keeps communication clear.
- Secure, role-based access speeds up reviews and approvals.
- Integrations with Google Suite, Microsoft Suite, QuickBooks, and Dropbox streamline management.
Collaborate in Real-Time with Co-Counsels, Avoiding the Hassle of Endless Emails and Calls
Legal teams often struggle to share documents and matter-related info with outside counsel, especially when both use different storage systems and platforms. Which leads to lost or mismatched files.
Tackling Collaboration Challenges Between In-House Teams and Outside Counsel
Software offers separate co-counsel portals to manage external counsel.
- These platforms link all documents, communications, and budgets under one space
- It helps teams in assigning tasks, tracking external counsel performance, and budget.
- Legal teams can allow co-counsel to update matter info, add documents, track budget, and more.
Keep Clients and Other Stakeholders Updated with Portals, Ensure Clear Communication
When teams don’t keep all stakeholders updated, it leads to confusion over who’s responsible for tasks and when they’re due. Missed updates and unclear directions can cause duplicate work or overlooked deadlines, slowing down the whole process.
From Misunderstandings to Alignment: Enhancing Stakeholder Communication
Legal teams address this by using software with dedicated client and co-counsel portals.
- These portals keep everyone updated on the matter’s status in real time.
- Teams can easily share documents and collaborate with stakeholders.
- Clients stay updated with the matter status and deadlines.
- Co-counsel can edit or add missing information directly to the matter, ensuring accuracy and transparency.
Automate Reminders and Matter-Linked Deadlines to Help Legal Teams Stay Updated
While working on various matters, it becomes essential to stay updated on status, deadlines, and tasks. Using traditional ways, like Excel sheets to note tasks and dates, can cause errors. And lead to missing important matters and missed communication between team members.
Missing Deadlines? Here’s How Legal Teams Can Stay Organized and On Track
Software simplifies assigning tasks, setting priorities, tracking deadlines, and analyzing performance. Additionally, its:
- Automated calendaring and task dashboards send reminders and assign responsibilities.
- Every deadline is linked directly to its matter record for easy reference.
- These tools help in-house teams stay organized and streamline workflow.
Draft Legal Documents and Emails in Multiple Languages with the help of AI
Drafting is one of the most tedious tasks for any legal department, and doing it efficiently is essential. Teams spend hours drafting a single contract and still end up making errors. Every draft needs the right clauses, consistent formatting, and the correct names and dates.
Enhancing Legal Communication: Effective Drafting of Emails and Contracts
Teams adopt AI drafting solutions to save time and reduce errors in document creation It includes:
- AI drafts emails, cover letters, NDAs, and lengthy contracts within seconds.
- Provides professional formats and legally enforceable terms for contracts.
- Built-in multilingual translation enables the creation of customized intake forms in multiple languages.
- Facilitates global collaboration by overcoming language barriers.
Use Platforms that are Secure, Compliant, and Assure Data Protection
In-house teams deal with vast amounts of sensitive information, from confidential client data to matter-related data. Inadequate security measures can cause a data breach, exposing all this sensitive data to the risk of being tampered with.
Staying Ahead: Minimizing the Risk of Non-Compliance in Legal Operations
Leading legal teams use matter management platforms with enterprise-grade security to mitigate compliance risks they face:
- ISO-certified infrastructure ensures robust data protection.
- Control-based access allows teams to manage who can view or edit sensitive information.
- Some platforms offer on-demand certifications and compliance documentation for added assurance.
How MatterSuite Helps Legal Teams to Smartly Tackle Challenges
Handling legal matters can be a headache for legal teams if not done properly. We have an overview of what matter management is, what the challenges are, and its solution. Let’s discuss how MatterSuite’s features can help legal teams tackle these challenges:
- It centralises matter tracking by storing all matter-related data in cloud storage and document repositories.
- Create, store, and access legal documents securely stored with version control to avoid data breaches.
- Assign tasks, set priorities and reminders, and track critical deadlines with the team’s calendar.
- Communicate and collaborate with internal teams and co-counsel in real time with the help of dedicated portals.
- Get data-driven insights into matter progress, costs, expenses, and outcomes by customised reports and dashboards.
- Provide role-based access for calendar, documents, matters, tasks, and more to give the team full control over its data.
- Run conflict checks and maintain regulatory compliance to keep teams away from ethical breaches.
- It syncs with Microsoft, OneDrive, QuickBooks, Google Suite, and more to unify managing matters.
Conclusion
The legal matter management challenges in-house teams face—disorganised workflows, poor collaboration, compliance risks, and inefficient drafting—are real, but so are the solutions.
Leading legal departments have proven that centralising data, automating workflows, and embracing smart tools like AI-driven drafting and secure matter management platforms can transform chaos into clarity.
Whether it’s drafting contracts in seconds with AI or collaborating seamlessly through dedicated portals, the tools exist to turn legal operations into a strategic asset.
