Operating Legal Like a Business: Why Modern Matter Management Is Critical for Legal Departments
Oct 21, 2025
Legal departments are under more pressure than ever… and yet, they are still being asked to use the same old tools with the same old limitations. Matter volume continues to grow. Legal requests come in from all directions. And overworked departments lack what they need most: visibility.
Yet budgets are shrinking and many Legal teams still manage matters in spreadsheets, generic project tools like Jira (which weren’t built for legal), or legacy systems that prioritize litigation and outside counsel spend over the day-to-day operations of in-house Legal teams.
A business wouldn’t ask Sales to operate without a CRM or Finance to operate without an ERP, yet Legal is still expected to run multimillion-dollar matters out of inboxes and Slack messages.
What Is Matter Management and Why It’s Essential
Matter management is the backbone of a modern legal department: it’s about organizing and tracking the work that Legal teams handle every day — contracts, litigation, investigations, compliance reviews, IP disputes, etc.—with the goal of providing visibility, accountability, operational maturity, and risk mitigation.
Today, as Legal teams are being measured by quantifiable business impact, matter management must be more than a matter number and a status field.
Still, many legacy tools maintain a narrow focus on outside counsel spend—ignoring the day-to-day operations and knowledge management Legal teams handling substantial work internally actually need. Worse, when spend management is bundled with matter tools, many teams are priced out of the software they need most, as most ELM tools are based on outside counsel spend.
6 Signs Your Matter Management Approach (or Lack Thereof) is Leaving You Exposed
If any of these sound familiar, your current matter management process is likely exposing your business to risk:
No centralized place to track matters or collaborate with stakeholders
Manual, inconsistent reporting
Disjointed outside counsel collaboration
Legal requests coming in from every direction with no intake process
Legal knowledge stuck in inboxes or lost
Your system of record wasn’t built for Legal
Each of these gaps can lead to missed deadlines, compliance oversights, poor decision making, and costly mistakes — creating material consequences for the business.
Mitigating Risk with Modern Matter Management
Legal teams today need tools built for speed, scale, and structure—not software engineering workflows. A modern matter management platform should include:
A centralized repository for all matters — not just those involving external counsel
Customizable workflows and task management — aligned with how your team works
Seamless collaboration — for communication between internal and external stakeholders
Integrated legal intake — for full visibility and smarter triage.
Real-time reporting — tailored to legal KPIs
Features built for Legal teams — not generic project management
Together, these capabilities give teams the tools to operate the legal department like a business: proactively, strategically, and with full accountability — staying ahead of potential exposure and giving the C-Suite data-backed answers for budget planning.
How Traact Simplifies Matter Management
Traact helps Legal teams stay in control with a purpose-built, easy-to-use, and cost-effective matter management platform designed for in-house realities. It includes:
Configurable Workflows & Practice Area Templates
Define workflows and templates by matter type. Track legal work your way.
A Centralized Matter Hub
Store matters, documents, deadlines, tasks, and stakeholders in one place. Fully searchable. Fully secure.
Built-In Collaboration
Add outside counsel, finance, or business partners to matters. Tag users. Track action items. All in one workspace.
Automated Reporting & Insights
Generate real-time reports by matter type, region, attorney, status, or whichever data point you are tracking.
Integrated Legal Intake
Give business units a simple way to submit requests, while your Legal team gets the visibility to assign, prioritize, and respond faster.
Replacing Whack-a-Mole with Strategy: The Power of Modern Matter Management
In today’s fast-paced environment, matter management isn’t just about keeping track of legal projects—it’s about operating Legal like a business.
Without modern matter management, teams risk disorganization, knowledge loss, and employee burnout. Because managing 200 open matters in a shared Excel file is not a personality trait.
With it, they can operate proactively, strategically, and at scale, ensuring every legal matter is accounted for and each risk is managed.
Traact affordably provides legal departments with the visibility, control, and confidence to manage matters across the enterprise, with the flexibility to scale as the organization grows.
Tired of spreadsheet roulette? 👉 Book a demo and see how Traact simplifies matter management.