Legal management software or matter management is a detailed software representation of all the legal process steps, allowing attorneys, business managers, and even external counsel and consultants to enter pertinent information concerning a legal matter. The value of such software is the enforcement of processes and the resulting visibility of legal proceedings to management and counsel. If internal legal procedures dictate that discoveries are conducted in a certain set of steps and that specific documents are collected, a matter management system will guide and then ensure that the attorneys involved will collect the appropriate information, allowing the team to also file the documents on the system to be archived and retrieved for later viewing and comment.
Software-as-a-service features make it possible to distribute the matter management application internally to every member of the team from counsel to executive and also outside the firm’s internal corporate network. Access to the system is highly secure based on hardened authentication routines making it highly protective and therefore extensible to external clients.
Early in the legal process, legal hold procedures define the overall scope of the legal matter. Legal hold software integrates with matter management software to share a common repository of information, so a seamless transition can be made between early investigations and later proceedings. Integral to the system is a fully loaded list of the organization’s personnel drawn from system repositories like Microsoft’s Active Directory or a company’s personnel system. All participating persons can then be easily connected to legal matters within the software application.
Because parties participating most likely require billing actions, these applications also integrate well with Legal E Billing solutions. Attorneys and consultants enter appropriate information in the system, adhering to the legal workflow, and at the same time enter the hours to complete each task. The result will generate invoices in the Legal E Billing software. The firm then has the ability to track charges and ensure management of case costs.
COMMENTS