The "Big Four" Law Firm Automation
Law Firms require a set of core systems to provide the fundamental building blocks of a sound technology platform. The "Big 4"' are:
Matter Management
Document Management
Desktop Application
Outside Counsel Management
Now let's take a look at Matter Management; Why is this important? Matter Management is the process employed by legal professionals to initiate and track the delivery of legal services to their clients. It serve a variety of functions including conflict control, accurate matter opening, day-to-day matter work, business intelligence, and marketing. This includes the tracking of such items as the attorneys and other workers on the case, type of legal work, industry of the client, witnesses, judges, Courts, opposing counsel, issues, documents, budgets and invoices associated with each particular legal matter. Law firms also use matter management to organize information about documents and email, time worked or billed, and much more. Case Management is a sub-set of matter management and generally refers to law firm related activities ("cases").
What is matter centric?
Matter-centricity is an approach in which information in multiple repositories is either unified within centralized data stores or linked together with a common identifier such as the unique matter billing number. This concept benefits attorneys as the ease of storing and finding client information is more efficient. Present day Matter Management Systems have evolved into Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) and adds spend management, risk management and compliance tracking modules.
Matter Management Capabilities
Categorize and track all substantive legal work in a centralized database
Organize contacts including clients, outside counsel, experts and more
Provide workload management
Automate workflow procedures
Track metrics and provide detailed reporting
Matter Management Benefits
Eliminates singular reliance on paper files and provides "real time" access to matters
Promotes a consistent standard to managing matters
Enables analysis of expenditures and reduction of costs
Provides metrics and reports to analyse and improve law departments operations
While some law firms have been slow to adapt to technological changes, the trends are slowly changing. Stay tuned to the "Big Four" as we take a look at Types of Matter Management Systems on our next post. Until then...Be Great!
