5 Top Reasons to Implement Matter Management in 2021

It’s the perfect moment for matter management

As organizations across industries settle into a sense of normalcy, efficiency and responsiveness have taken on a new level of importance. The pandemic caused changes that nobody could have anticipated, and it’s paramount to cast an eye over your day-to-day operations and solutions and analyze and appraise each one.

An effective matter management solution should support all corporate legal matter types, which can include a variety of tasks, including contracts and transactions, claims, governance and compliance, intellectual property, and more.

The return to work and to the office requires a heightened focus on your solutions and strategies.  As your employees adjust to a new work environment that balances both traditional in-office spaces and working from home capabilities, there are new challenges to face to ensure business continuity. Old hurdles such as using disconnected systems should be a receding blot in your rear-view mirror!

A centralized matter management hub is more important than ever

Your matter management system should be the central hub for all legal matters in your organization.

As your team operates across remote and in-office workspaces, or hybrid variants?  You need to ensure that all team members have immediate and equal access to relevant materials, documents, status updates, and case details. Having a set of disconnected systems for information retrieval can result in your team having to navigate a complex web of scattered data, wasting time, effort, and money.

When employees use separate, disjointed applications and outside software, you could also face issues like duplicate work. This posed a problem even when most of your employees worked at the same physical office – it will only be heightened now. At a time when efficiency is key, precious hours could be wasted redoing work that was already completed. Eliminate this possibility and spend that time focusing on more valuable tasks.

Reduce human error

While this isn’t tied entirely to 2021, it stands true – paper-based and manual matter management processes leave far more margin for error. However, this does tie in with the previous point: a frustrated or bored employee is more likely to make mistakes than one that is actively engaged in her/his tasks. Missed deadlines, inefficiencies…they’re understandable, perhaps, but readily avoidable. Circumvent costly mistakes altogether by automating these processes, including document maintenance and billing guideline enforcement, for instance.

When you consider the potential costs of these sorts of human errors, then the events of the past year and the need for greater accuracy in Legal Ops do make this relevant to 2021 and beyond: Can your organization afford the kind of mistakes in matter management it might have been able to shrug off in the past?

[bctt tweet=”In 2021, can your organization afford the kind of mistakes in matter management it might have been able to shrug off in the past?” via=”yes”]

You should already be there

As we said at the very beginning, if you don’t have a matter management solution in place already, you’re playing with fire. The easiest answer as to why you should have one?  It helps your company’s financial health and insulates it from risk, but as you can see, the benefits extend far beyond that. You need complete visibility and control over the entire matter lifecycle.

It can be argued this is as much a matter of ethics as it is business: Are you really giving your clients the best possible service if you’re not using the best available tools?

As you deal with the new challenges that 2020 has presented, you probably have enough contributors to your headaches.  Effective, streamlined, and transparent matter management shouldn’t be one of them.