What Is Matter Management (and Why Your Law Firm Needs It Now)?
Keeping track of cases, clients, deadlines, documents, and collaboration is a challenge law firms of all sizes face. Matter management is the modern law firm’s essential tool for organizing complexity, boosting productivity, and delivering better client outcomes.
What Is Matter Management?
Matter management is the process of organizing, tracking, and managing everything related to a legal matter. That includes documents, time entries, communications, deadlines, financials, and more: all in one central place.
What is the Matter Management Process?
The matter management process is more than just a digital filing cabinet; it’s a clear, repeatable framework for how your firm handles every part of a legal matter, from intake to close. A well-defined process usually includes:
- Matter intake: Capture all relevant client details, conflict checks, and initial documents in one step.
- Task and deadline management: Assign tasks, set milestones, and track key dates to keep the matter on course and avoid costly oversights.
- Document management: Access to all matter-related documents in a secure, easily searchable hub.
- Time and expense tracking: Log billable hours and expenses accurately as the work happens—no more guesswork at month-end.
- Collaboration: Enable real-time communication and sharing among lawyers, clients, and external partners, all tied to the matter.
- Reporting and insights: Monitor progress, budgets, and outcomes with dashboards and reports that inform better decision-making.
When your process is streamlined and connected, you cut down on repetitive administrative work, reduce errors, and create a consistent experience for both your team and your clients.
The Importance of Matter Management
Why does matter management matter so much? Because it directly impacts your firm’s profitability, reputation, and operational efficiency. With a central system, legal teams can significantly reduce the risk of information getting lost, deadlines slipping, and collaboration stalling. Additionally, lawyers can spend less time on low-value tasks like hunting for documents or recreating work, and more time on advising clients.
Effective matter management:
- Reduces risk: Stay compliant and meet client expectations with clear audit trails, up-to-date documents, and visible deadlines
- Boosts productivity: Automate routine tasks and workflows, freeing your team to focus on high-value strategic work
- Enhances client service: Provide real-time updates, transparent billing, and faster turnaround times that strengthen client trust
- Improves profitability: Capture every billable moment and ensure work doesn’t slip through the cracks, so you maximize revenue
In a competitive legal landscape, matter management isn’t just an operational upgrade, it’s a strategic advantage that helps you win and keep clients while empowering your lawyers to do their best work.
But not all matter management solutions are created equal. Comprehensive and innovative software, like Litera Matter Management (formerly known as Peppermint Case and Matter Management), go beyond basic tracking—they connect your tools, simplify your workflows, and create a 360° view of the matter, empowering lawyers to work smarter, not harder.
Why Would Your Firm Need a Matter Management Software?
If your team still spends time searching through email threads, switching between multiple systems, or manually updating spreadsheets to manage matters, consolidating everything into a single, connected platform frees up time for higher-value work.
Here’s what top-performing law firms gain from the right solution:
- 30% increase in productivity
- 40% more billable hours
- 50% reduction in app development time
Whether you’re handling high-volume work or complex multi-party litigation, a modern matter management platform drives efficiency, improves collaboration, and strengthens client relationships.
As Joanne Giles, Partner at Pinsent Masons, puts it: “[Litera Matter Management] will be key in how we manage large and complex legal matters with our clients.”
How Do You Use Matter Management Software (and Drive Adoption at Law Firms)?
The key to successful adoption is simple: make it easy for lawyers and their administrative teams to use.
That’s why Litera Matter Management integrates with the tools your team already uses. No more jumping between platforms or clunky interfaces. Here’s how it works:
- Manage matters directly from your inbox
Create contacts, opportunities, and tasks straight from Outlook. The Connect panel shows all contacts linked to an email and lets you instantly take action. - Collaborate and centralize communications in Microsoft Teams
Launch Teams chats from the Connect panel and keep conversations matter-specific, no more scattered communications. - See everything at a glance
Interactive dashboards surface recent activity, work in progress, documents, and deadlines so you can stay on top of every matter. - Seamless integration with iManage and SharePoint Online
No matter where your documents live, Litera Matter Management helps you access them effortlessly.
As Abby Ewen, Chief Innovation Officer at Browne Jacobson, explains: “[Litera Matter Management] puts us in the best position to enhance how we serve our clients today, and to embrace the opportunities of the future.”
What Makes Litera Matter Management So Powerful?
Litera Matter Management is part of the Peppermint CX365 platform, an all-in-one legal technology ecosystem that brings together matter management, CRM, document automation, and workflow in a single cloud-based solution.
Here’s what sets Litera Matter Management apart:
- Holistic client views that give you full visibility into all interactions, documents, and activities
- Seamless integrations with Microsoft 365, Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, and third-party systems
- Process Automation at Scale helps legal teams take advantage of native business process flows and automated stage progression for consistent, compliant case and matter handling—right out of the box
- Copilot Embedded empowers users with AI-driven insights, summaries, and natural language queries directly within the app—no need to leave the platform
- Effortless time capture and robust document production
- Customizable dashboards and reporting to track progress and uncover insights, with a low-core/no-code environment
- Secure, scalable cloud platform with regular updates and industry-leading compliance helps legal teams be audit-ready
Nirupa Wikramanayake, CIO at Irwin Mitchell, sums it up: “[Litera Matter Management] is a proven supplier in this field – they demonstrated great experience and knowledge of the industry.”
Ready to Modernize Your Matter Management?
If you’re ready to work smarter, boost billable hours, and delight clients with faster, more responsive service, Litera Matter Management is the solution your firm has been waiting for.
Schedule a demo and see how your team can transform the way you manage legal work.
