Building a Strategic Legal Function Through Effective Matter Management
In-house legal teams are expected to play a strategic role in mitigating risk and guiding the organisation through increasingly complex legal and regulatory landscapes. However, when legal teams are juggling multiple matters without a clear framework for prioritisation or accountability, they can quickly find themselves in reactive mode. Urgent tasks take precedence, long-term strategic objectives are sidelined and staying ahead becomes nearly impossible.
Consider this scenario:
A mid-sized enterprise is expanding rapidly. The legal team receives three urgent matters in a single morning alongside another flagged as “critical”. Each request comes through a different channel: email, Teams and a spreadsheet circulated by finance. Team members start working immediately but because matter details are scattered:
One matter stalls because no single owner is clearly responsible
Supporting documents for another matter are lost in a tangle of emails causing delays
Workload is uneven across the team with some members overloaded while others have lighter workloads
By the end of the day the team feels busy yet progress is fragmented. Work is not visible, priorities are unclear and leadership struggles to get a complete picture of the legal workload. This is not just inefficient, but if it continues over time, it becomes a missed opportunity for legal to add strategic value.
The good news is that legal teams can regain control by adopting structured matter management practices. By introducing a clear framework supported by technology, teams gain clarity, accountability and control. Instead of constantly firefighting, they can focus on matters that drive business outcomes, manage risk effectively and operate as a proactive partner to the business.
1. Structured Matter Intake
The way a matter enters the legal workflow sets the tone for how it will be handled. Capturing essential details, centralising matter intake and prioritising matters correctly reduces unnecessary back and forth and ensures the team starts on the right foot.
To learn more about matter intake, read this article.
2. Centralised Matter Storage
Scattered emails, personal drives and spreadsheets slow legal teams down. Storing all matters in a secure centralised location and keeping related documents, emails and notes together ensures all relevant information is always at hand.
3. Clear Ownership and Accountability
Every matter should have a designated owner and defined stakeholders. Clarifying responsibilities prevents matters from stalling and ensures work continues smoothly even if someone is unavailable.
4. Prioritisation of Matters
Highlighting critical matters based on urgency, deadlines and business impact, and allocating resources accordingly ensures the team focuses on what matters most and prevents less critical work from slowing progress.
5. Tracking Progress and Deadlines
Monitoring each matter is key to staying in control. Using status updates, timelines or dashboards to see where matters stand and highlighting pending actions keeps the team proactive rather than constantly catching up.
6. Reporting and Visibility
In-house legal teams need insight into their workload to manage capacity and demonstrate impact. Monitoring workloads, identifying trends across matter types and providing leadership with data turns operational visibility into actionable insight and positions the legal function as a strategic partner to the business.
Conclusion
Structured matter management is not just about being more organised. It gives legal teams the visibility and control they need to focus on what matters most and gives leaders confidence that risk, workload and priorities are being managed effectively.
When matters are captured consistently, ownership is clear and progress is easy to track. Legal teams can then move from reacting to requests, to proactively supporting business goals. Matters become easier to prioritise, workloads can be balanced and demonstrating legal value becomes easier. Cubed by Law Squared helps in-house legal teams implement structured matter management by centralising matter intake, enabling matter prioritisation, assigning ownership, tracking progress and providing visibility into workloads. Cubed is Microsoft 365 native, so it integrates seamlessly with tools teams already use such as Copilot, Outlook and SharePoint, making adoption straightforward and intuitive. By combining workflow best practice with technology, Cubed enables legal teams to operate proactively, focus on what matters most and showcase their impact to the business.
Ready to see it in action? Request a demo of Cubed today.