Managing legal work without structure leads to scattered information, lost requests, and limited visibility into what the legal team is doing. As workloads grow, inboxes and spreadsheets become time-consuming and unreliable, making it harder for in-house counsel to get true visibility into legal’s workload, prioritize, track progress, or demonstrate value to the business.
Matter management solves this problem by centralizing all legal work into one secure, organized workspace. As one of the core features in a modern legal operations platform, such as a unified legal workspace, it gives teams control over their entire workload, improves collaboration, and enables meaningful reporting that connects legal to business outcomes.
Matter management is the capability that centralizes all your legal work into one organized legal workspace, giving in-house teams complete visibility and control. In LawVu, this means capturing legal requests through structured intake, triaging, and assigning work with clear ownership, and managing every matter with built-in tasks, status updates, documents, conversations, and deadlines. Each matter becomes a single source of truth with all context, files, and decisions in one place, supported by powerful search, reporting, and dashboards. Together, these features help legal teams work faster, stay engaged and aligned with the business, and demonstrate their value with real-time data.
Read this guide to learn how to find and implement the best legal matter management solution.
Matter management typically follows a simple, repeatable flow:
Matter management brings together a set of core features that help in-house legal teams work more efficiently and transparently. Each feature plays a specific role in reducing manual effort, improving collaboration and strengthening legal’s connection to the business. The table below breaks down how these capabilities translate into practical, everyday benefits for legal teams.
The following use cases illustrate how in-house counsel apply matter management across different types of work, helping them stay organized, respond faster, and maintain visibility from intake through to resolution.
Matter management is the process of organizing and tracking all in-house legal work in one system, from intake to completion. Instead of juggling emails, chats, and spreadsheets, everything lives in a single, trackable workspace.
It takes the chaos out of managing legal requests. With a centralized view, clearer visibility, fewer manual tasks, and better reporting, teams can respond faster and show the business exactly what they’re working on.
Think of matter management as the home for all legal work, and contract management as the tool that handles the contract lifecycle specifically. They work best together but serve different purposes.
In-house counsel, legal operations, GCs, and paralegals use it daily – and business users benefit too when they submit requests through structured intake instead of ad-hoc emails, messages, conversations or phone calls.
Everything from contract creation or review requests and HR issues to compliance tasks, disputes, regulatory matters, and day-to-day legal advice. If it comes into legal, it can be tracked as a matter.
