Today’s legal industry is a highly demanding one, with in-house counsel facing mounting pressures to increase efficiencies while reducing both costs and potential risk. Delivering improved business processes while also providing high-quality legal services in a quick and efficient manner can often seem like competing objectives. Successfully bridging that gap requires a modern matter management solution capable of creating business process improvements that result in the quick delivery of services while maintaining quality and bringing business value to the company.
The Case for Matter Management
In most corporations, internal IT staff are overburdened, with little time to focus on matters of legal operations management. In the absence of such IT support, in-house counsel need to find additional tools to help with matter management, even though, through no fault of their own, they are often unfamiliar with the best solutions for efficiency, cost savings, and service delivery. As a result, many in-house legal departments have historically relied on an unintegrated, cobbled-together collection of disparate systems, each responsible for a discrete aspect of matter management.
Successful matter management that leads to concrete business process improvements, however, requires a comprehensive, holistic approach. Only by having an integrated view of any given matter through a centralized matter management platform can you view and manage every aspect of a matter, from start to finish. Switching between systems and platforms opens the door to errors and inefficiencies that create significant risk for the company and its clients.
Comprehensive matter management tools streamline and expedite matter intake, allowing in-house counsel to more quickly assign the right teams before moving on to delegate roles and tasks, manage those tasks, make adjustments to strategy and staffing as needed, and institute best practices — typically all with the assistance of automation. The same cannot be said when using a collection of disparate systems. By streamlining matter management from intake to completion, legal departments free up valuable time for attorneys to focus on high-value legal work, business process improvements, and legal innovation.
Cloud-based matter management tools open the door to even more business process improvements through increased agility and greater capacity for innovation. Employing cloud-based matter management allows for greater security for data and systems, because cloud vendors have already invested billions of dollars in security. Cloud-based matter management platforms seamless integrate with best-in-class, third-party applications and come with automatic upgrades so you never have to worry that your technology is obsolete. Centralized cloud-based matter management tools also allow in-house counsel to have access to important business matters anytime, anywhere, which means better service for clients.
Better Focus on Business Matters
With a comprehensive matter management solution, corporate legal departments are in the best possible position to eliminate inefficient manual processes, gain increased visibility into workloads, and access the kind of reporting and analytics that management wants to see. General counsels are under constant pressure to run corporate legal departments like businesses, and matter management allows them to do just that. Proper matter management empowers you to align your department’s goals and strategy with that of your overall organization, allowing you to show the clear value that you bring to the business.
Jonathan Reed is the CEO and co-founder of AdvoLogix. He currently leads AdvoLogix growth in the SaaS marketplace. He also serves as the chief security officer for the company and advises Fortune 50 clients on cloud-security compliance and ongoing governance for enterprise SaaS applications. He can be reached at jreed@advologix.com.