Legal Matter Management

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Legal Matter Management or Matter Management can be defined as the comprehensive project management of legal matters within a corporate legal department. Matter management software systems help corporate legal departments and their staff manage the day to day complexities involved in managing legal matters. This includes the tracking of such items as the People, Issues, Documents, Budgets and Invoices associated with each particular legal matter. Corporations can utilize 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 witnesses, court reporters, copy services, etc.). 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.

Legal Matter Management differs from Legal Case Management or case management due to the primary user base. Legal Matter Management software is designed for corporate legal departments managing large blocks of similar matters while case management is designed for law firms and the management of individual cases.

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: the level of customization the software offers, whether the software can be installed "behind corporate security and firewalls" or if the software is only hosted as an Internet-based ASP application and whether or not the deployment methodology meets Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA security and audit compliance mandates.