We consider how they can help you keep track of your workflow and collaborate with colleagues, both internal and external.
When you first join a new organisation, it can take a while to get used to all the different solutions that are used to manage its matters, cases, contracts, documents and general workflow. This article is designed to help you get up to speed quickly and consider how all these essential core systems work together.
Getting familiar with your department’s technologies
When you move into an in-house role, one of your first challenges will probably be to acquaint yourself with the various systems and software applications you’ll be working with every day. These include systems for matter management, document management and contract management.
Additionally, there can be a number of additional or complementary solutions that may overlap with the above.
There are many systems designed for in-house legal departments, and many can be tailored to the specific needs of your organisation or the nature of your work. So, here’s our brief guide to the most common types of legal department management systems.
Matter management systems
A matter management system is a central database or system that records information on all matters (e.g. individual projects, client or supplier negotiations, advertising campaign advice, pieces of litigation etc) handled and all work carried out by the legal team.
Some fields, such as matter description or project name, type, opening and closing dates, the legal team or practice area concerned and the relevant jurisdiction, are universal across the legal department. Others can be customised for the unique needs of specific practice areas. For example, if you specialise in litigation, you’ll probably need to record information such as court dates, claim amounts and other related details.
One of the great advantages of matter management systems is that they make all the legal department’s activities fully visible to everyone involved. This means that members in one team can understand what their colleagues are working on and vice versa. And, if you lead the department, you can manage individual members’ workloads, assess your organisation’s overall exposure to risk and report to the board on the legal department’s financials.
Reporting capabilities usually include dashboards and reports that you can print off and incorporate into other documents. Of course, the quality and depth of the data you can see and share via your matter management system depends on people using it correctly and recording all the relevant information.
You can also use matter management systems to record internal non-legal work. This will give you a full view of the legal department’s work and involvement with the wider organisation. You could then use this information to manage workflow and route some matters to legal or business colleagues within your organisation or escalate relevant issues.
Case management systems
Matter management systems are similar to but distinct from litigation case management systems that incorporate the higher volume of documents that are associated with litigation and tend to be less detailed than matter management. However, most organisations use case management systems for higher volume, lower value matters, which lend themselves to automation, mainly through template-driven documents. A law firm is more likely to use a case management system than an in-house team.
Note that “case management” is a bit of a confusing term because it can also refer to more general solutions used for incident tracking and resolution in areas such as customer service and HR.
Document management systems
Document management systems track and centrally store electronic documents and emails. They replace personal or shared network folders and rely on individual email accounts. Document management systems are ideal for corporate legal teams, which usually organise their content around legal matters, cases or projects where the matters are heavily documented using a variety of different document types and/or authors.
Most legal document management systems are tightly integrated (technically and often also in terms of "look and feel") with the Microsoft Office suite. This enables people already familiar with Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint to adapt to them quickly and maintain efficiency across the legal department.
Because the implications of mismanaging documents can be catastrophic for a legal team, management systems for legal departments are often more sophisticated than generic alternatives or enterprise content management systems. They encourage users to save all content in the system and automate the check-in/check-out process. Most also integrate very tightly with Outlook, which is the still the most likely email package used by a business. As well as allowing you to drag and drop emails into the document management system, they often automate email filing.
Other features often found in document management systems include a powerful full text search facility, automatic document numbering, version control settings and sophisticated audit functionality.
You can also enable other people, both internally and externally, to have temporary or permanent access to specific areas, matters, cases, projects and folders within your document management system.
It is sometimes the case that while in-house or compliance teams use a dedicated document management system, on a wider scale, document management throughout an organisation is based on SharePoint. This is part of Microsoft 365 and offers a decentralised way to manage documents with some potential for central monitoring. In these examples, SharePoint in itself might be the system most used for managing, storing and finding documents, but it is not the system of record and is probably not fit-for-purpose for the needs of an in-house team looking for a more comprehensive document management solution.
Contract management systems
Many people use the term contract management to describe different aspects of the "contract lifecycle" (from pre-contractual negotiation to the end of the performance of and payment for the obligations documented in the contract). For this reason, most contract management systems support specific stages or aspects of the overall contract process.
As well as automating document creation, contract management systems allow you to capture and store contract information. This means you can search for and retrieve key elements of that data by criteria such as the parties to a contract, expiry dates, values, liabilities and jurisdictions.
If your organisation has a contract management system, it will probably also allow you to manage workflows and set it to generate automatic reminders for tasks such as contract renewals and reviews.
It may even include, or be linked to, sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that can extract data elements from contract documents and images and increasingly allow business users to create draft contracts through an associated workflow.
Complementary governance and compliance solutions
There is a whole range of other governance and compliance related solutions that businesses can use to help minimise risk which touch on elements of document and contract management and may be adopted by an in-house legal team.
Some mature compliance solutions have developed into comprehensive suites of capabilities that are integrated together. Typically, these might focus on policy and procedure management which supports the creation and distribution of controlled documents, as well as some contract management capabilities. Other tools might relate to incident management, managing conflicts of interest and risk assessment.
Factors which impact document, contract and matter management
Additionally, there are a number of other factors that play a role in document, contract and matter management systems and can impact their effectiveness:
- Knowledge management
- Search
- AI
- Integration.
We explore each of these briefly below.
Knowledge management
Knowledge management plays an important role in law firms to help manage the flow of knowledge to support legal work. There will usually be a KM team who:
- manage subscriptions to specialist in-house sources
- might facilitate search
- be responsible for taxonomy management to provide consistency across different systems
- provide access to precedents and model documents
- include Professional Support Lawyers (PSLs)
- manage knowledge systems like the intranet
- provide governance and support for the introduction of AI.
Their work can also overlap and impact files and data that is stored and managed across document, contract and matter management systems.
KM is also important for legal in-house teams, but access to KM professionals and KM practices will vary depending on the size of the team.
Search
Search plays an important role in all of the above because users need to be able to find items, particularly within their document management system where there can be thousands of documents spanning many years.
Each solution will have its own in-built way to search or browse for a document or record. However, sometimes firms invest in enterprise search solutions that enable searches across multiple systems including across a document management system. This is more likely to occur in some sectors which are more knowledge intensive, such as pharmaceuticals or professional services.
The role of integration
Many legal departments link and integrate their matter, document and contract management systems to each other as well as other technologies such as billing and document assembly systems. Integration is important as it can allow workflows and the use of common data to ensure more efficient working for in-house legal teams.
Most of the solutions mentioned in this article are designed to be standalone, complete solutions but then also support integration with other products in different ways. Some will nestle within an integrated suite of complementary products from the same vendor that can be bolted on to create a wider solution. Others will have “connectors” available “out of the box” that allow a solution to be integrated with other common enterprise solutions such as SharePoint. Most will also have an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows a team of developers to create a custom integration.
Systems might also integrate with an environment that holds all your data in a structured way so different solutions can inherent the same information, for example connecting documents in your document management system to matters held in your matter management system.
The role of AI
AI is disrupting how we use technology for legal work. The majority of enterprise technology systems are trying to incorporate AI into their existing solutions while new challenger products are also emerging.
Document, matter and contract management are already areas where AI-powered features are in use today, providing smarter workflows, advanced automation, improved insights and analytics, improved search, document generation, and more. AI has the potential to particularly drive automation in contract management, and there are already a number of solutions on the market.
Expect to see more AI applied in this area both built into the core document, matter and contract management solutions themselves, as well as additional products that sit alongside and integrate with an existing core solution, bringing AI capabilities into the mix.
Conclusion
Starting a new job often means learning new systems and technologies. Though bewildering at first, they usually prove invaluable in the pursuit of seamless collaboration, readily available data and departmental efficiency.
For example, matter management systems give you a central database on all matters handled and all work carried out by the legal team. Document management systems allow you to track and search all documents relevant to a particular project or legal case, while contract management systems let you focus on specific aspects of a contract throughout its life cycle. Increasingly AI will also give valuable insights into legal work carried out.
Ultimately getting to know these systems inside out and quickly will help you to hit the ground running.