Without matter management technology, modern, data-driven legal leadership is a challenge

The in-house legal profession is undergoing a rapidly accelerating transformation. Over the past two decades, legal leadership has evolved dramatically – where corporate counsel once acted as “air traffic controllers”, we now occupy the role of business leaders with legal skills – strategic partners who provide a competitive advantage to the business. It is now imperative for legal leaders to operate at the same or higher levels of sophistication in leadership, management, and operations as our peers on the business leadership team. In this environment, leveraging data to predict risk, manage the team, and optimize operations is a necessity if we are to lead a modern, effective legal function.
Given this, an understanding of the legal technology landscape is critical as data-driven legal leadership requires the real-time transparency, data analytics, and visualization that modern, fit for purpose legal tech enables. There are a variety of categories of legal tech, including (but not limited to) standalone point solutions for document management, litigation case management, e-billing, and contract management, plus e-signature, legal team “front door”, data analysis and visualization, workflow automation, and use case focused AI tools. There are also integrated enterprise legal management (ELM) products, which do all or some of the above in one platform.
Among all these options, there’s one type of legal technology that in recent years has reached a level of maturity whereby it is now essential to modern, data-driven legal leadership: matter management (MM) technology. Without an effective, well-implemented matter management platform, legal leaders will struggle to have the visibility and insights needed to accurately and effectively lead modern legal functions.
Matter management – providing insight into more of what matters
While it’s increasingly common for larger legal organizations to implement e-billing and contract management solutions, teams of all sizes often operate with very limited transparency into the majority of their work. The pie chart below visualises the work of a legal team: there are percentages for contracts, interacting with law firms, and administrative tasks – while everything else, generally the majority, is matters. So, while an e-billing tool or CLM can provide valuable information, it’s very much a partial picture; without matter management you lack visibility into most of your team’s workload, which means that you are less likely to make accurate and effective decisions.
The majority of legal team work can be considered as a matter, and this work is often unaccounted for in reporting and technology solutions.
In this context, having a clear definition of what matters are in an in-house legal context is helpful. Matters are the majority of the work that most legal functions do, and include many things that are not contracts.
I’ve encountered some confusion in the in-house sector in regards to legacy litigation case management solutions versus modern matter management. There was a time when expensive and hard to use case/ matter management platforms were reserved for complex and lengthy litigation scenarios. This is no longer the case. Modern matter management systems are robust, cost effective, and easy to use, and the full spectrum of matters, from the highly complex to daily interactions with the legal function, can be captured and managed in real time.
One legal team I had dealings with told me that because they didn’t have significant litigation they did not see how a matter management system would benefit them. They made the mistake of thinking of matters in the traditional sense, as litigation related case files only and not the regular interactions with sales, marketing and HR that make up the bulk of what we do in-house.. If we insist on operating in this manner, we will continue to have limited transparency into the majority of our work: inaccurate data and reporting impacts our ability to optimize and scale the function, and showcase the value of legal.
The painful reality of trying to be data-driven without matter management technology
Over the years, I led large corporate legal departments before modern matter management technology was available. I relied on periodic surveys of my team to determine non-contract related workloads, asking them to recollect what they did over a particular (often lengthy) time period: what percentage of time did you spend on intellectual property matters, employment matters, corporate matters, admin, etc? I then manually created a chart from the information I received. It seems archaic now but we were doing our best to capture valuable data so we could optimize our leadership of the function. I’ve come to realize that this methodology, which is time consuming and annoying for the team, results in inaccurate data, which leads to inaccurate decision-making.
Not having a formal, modern process for matter management involving fit for purpose technology results in a constant struggle to maintain a high friction manual process, which impacts overall team efficiency and effectiveness. You might, for example, have a manual process involving an intake form, a spreadsheet, or an admin who is copied on emails – but in-house, issues are happening too quickly to rely on manual processes that require significant data entry or context switching. Without a system, processes are ad hoc, which by definition are inefficient and often ineffective. And, critically, you have no repeatable workflow and no platform to automate workflows, the result of which is no scalable way to accelerate the business.
Scaling the legal function is a critical component of modern legal leadership that can’t be achieved without people, process, and technology
To become a business leader with legal skills who operates at the same or higher level of sophistication in leadership, management, and operations as your business partner peers, you need to create a scalable, data-driven and cost-effective department. It’s been my experience that legal tech, and in particular matter management technology, along with people and process, accelerates the scaling of the legal function. When implemented well, the software creates consistency in your optimized ways of working, generating high-value data and transparency as a natural outcome of standardizing and streamlining your workflows.
- Matter management solutions help you scale your function: Many legal teams grow rapidly and lack a focus on processes, policies or technology. Throwing lawyers at the problem is the traditional solution to ever-growing workloads, but that is unscalable and ultimately causes friction for the business. Solving for matter management is an important part of solving for scale, and the perceived more for less dilemma – which I would reframe as a using different and not more resources challenge. None of our peer business functions have unlimited budgets, and they leverage fit for purpose technology via operations professionals as early as possible in their growth trajectories, building efficiency via automation as they grow, thus accelerating their business.
- Automating workflows via a matter management solution generates high-value data with far less effort: A good example would be intake of requests for legal support from the business. Modern MM solutions optimize for centralized intake that allows for business partners in marketing, HR and sales to request support via a scalable portal or email integration rather than via an unnecessary meeting, unstructured email or chat communications. The tool captures the request in a structured format, and all further interactions on that matter become data that is useful in driving further optimization.
Assessment and utilization of matter management solutions
Legal leaders wishing to operate in a modern, effective manner in line with their leadership team peers must advocate for the technology that will optimize their functions and accelerate their businesses. These leaders also need to become effective in using the data generated by these systems. To do this:
- Leverage the transparency you gain from MM data to improve operations with real insights: Workload volume, and where that work is coming from, are critical early metrics gained from a matter management solution. Are some business units using an outsized amount of legal resources? Are some units suspiciously off the radar? Does a particular sales department need more focus due to their strategic importance this quarter? Reporting may reveal an unusually low interaction with legal by a particular business unit, which can be investigated from a risk and strategic alignment perspective – all of which allows for a more accurate and sophisticated approach to managing the function.
- Focus on strategic alignment: With comprehensive and structured data on the majority of the work carried out by the legal function, a legal leader can prioritize resource allocation in accordance with business strategy in a manner that is most impactful to the business. Instead of relying solely on qualitative narratives, matter management allows a leader to communicate the value of the legal function with quantitative metrics in the language of the business. A MM solution should facilitate capturing information on business strategic alignment. As an example, I recently met a GC who showed me how her team is using LawVu to score matters on intake and throughout their lifecycle against business strategic objectives. They use that data for resource prioritization, reporting, and building business cases.
This image from the LawVu General Counsel dashboard is an example of visual reporting with a comprehensive view of all legal work, as well as specific metrics for business alignment.
- Visually impactful reporting is a key product feature: We are long past the era where legal leaders should be manually capturing, analyzing, and visualizing data captured in disparate legacy solutions. A modern, fit for purpose legaltech solution must provide easy to use, real-time analytics and visualizations. Comprehensive dashboards allow legal leaders to easily communicate visually compelling information on the impactful work legal teams carry out on a daily basis. They also allow for a more dynamic and modern approach to legal leadership – accelerating the function and ultimately driving the business.
The maturity and availability of effective matter management solutions is a boon for legal leaders who are embracing modern legal leadership and leveraging the power of data. Unprecedented visibility into the workload of our teams and the ability to easily report on that work with compelling visuals and comprehensive data, means we can scale the legal function, more accurately predict and manage risk and ultimately accelerate our businesses.
If you’re interested in learning more about matter management solutions and data-driven legal leadership, check out the resources below.
- LawVu Guide: Five steps to better matter management
- On-demand demo: A general counsel’s view of the LawVu legal workspace
- In-house Connect webinar: Data-driven legal leadership: Unlocking KPIs and metrics to elevate your legal department