Legal matter management or matter management refers to activities involved in managing all aspects of the corporate legal practice ("matters"). Matter management is distinguished from case management, in that case management is generally considered to refer to law firm related activities ("cases"). Matter management
software system
A software system is a system of intercommunicating components based on software forming part of a computer system (a combination of hardware and software). It "consists of a number of separate programs, configuration files, which are used to se ...
s serve a variety of functions including conflict and ethics 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,
document
A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', which denotes a "teaching" o ...
s,
budget
A budget is a calculation play, usually but not always financial, for a defined period, often one year or a month. A budget may include anticipated sales volumes and revenues, resource quantities including time, costs and expenses, environme ...
s and
invoice
An invoice, bill or tab is a commercial document issued by a seller to a buyer relating to a sale transaction and indicating the products, quantities, and agreed-upon prices for products or services the seller had provided the buyer.
Paym ...
s associated with each particular legal matter.
Corporations can use matter legal matter management software and systems to manage both their in-house counsel staffs as well as their outside counsel law firms and non-law firm legal service providers who work on legal matters on the corporation's behalf (i.e.,
expert witness
An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as ...
es,
court reporter
A court reporter, court stenographer, or shorthand reporter is a person whose occupation is to capture the live testimony in proceedings using a stenographic machine, thereby transforming the proceedings into an official certified transcript ...
s, copy services, etc.). Law firms might use matter management to organize information about documents and email, time worked or billed, people inside and outside the firm associated with case, deadlines and dockets, and much more.
Matter management systems can provide excellent communication and collaboration platforms to organize and distribute information, although new web-based collaboration tools are beginning to reduce the need for matter management systems as collaboration tools. Matter-centric collaboration tools may be the next step.
As these systems entail the processing and storage of confidential corporate and insurance carrier financial data, sensitive claims information, and privileged legal matter data, major considerations in the deployment of these systems are: availability of matter-level security, ability to handle ethical walls, the level of customization the software offers, whether the software can be installed "behind corporate
security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...
and
firewalls" or if the software is only hosted as an
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
-based
ASP application and whether or not the deployment methodology meets
Sarbanes-Oxley and
HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA or the Kennedy– Kassebaum Act) is a United States Act of Congress enacted by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 21, 1 ...
security and audit
compliance
Compliance can mean:
Healthcare
* Compliance (medicine), a patient's (or doctor's) adherence to a recommended course of treatment
* Compliance (physiology), the tendency of a hollow organ to resist recoil toward its original dimensions (this is a ...
mandates.
Legal project management
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vario ...
is a form of matter management that leverages the standards and practices of professional project management to more effectively manage legal matters or specific phases of a legal matter (e.g., legal-discovery projects).
Project management by type
Legal communication
Knowledge management
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