Legal affairs management software tracks attorney fees, collaboration, and performance for budgeting and cost management purposes. It simplifies invoicing, expenses, and commissions, and collects all legal data in one place for easy access and analysis. It provides a broad view of all activities, accounts, and open cases, and can compile reports and produce category comparisons. It is an invaluable tool for knowledge management and data accessibility.
Legal Affairs Management is a software-based means of tracking attorney fees, attorney collaboration, and overall legal performance. Corporate legal departments are often the largest consumers of legal affairs management programs, although the systems can also be useful for independent law firms. They are mostly used for budgeting and cost management purposes. In handling legal matters, a simple online platform simplifies invoicing, expenses and internal and external commissions.
For many legal departments, managing the data needed to run a successful business can be a challenge. Different projects are outsourced to different locations and many attorneys may be working on a number of cases at any one time. Issue management is a way to collect all of a company’s legal data in one place so that it can be easily accessed and analyzed online.
“Legal matter” is an umbrella term that covers nearly all elements of legal practice and proceedings that are not specific to the case. Law offices and law firms focus, of course, on individual cases and litigation, but there is much going on that is unrelated to or independent of the specific details of those cases. This often includes billing and invoice submission, day-to-day workflow, and overall expenses. The main objective of a legal affairs management system is to give operators a broad view of all activities, accounts and open cases at any given time.
There are many similarities between managing legal matters and managing legal cases, although the two have important differences and law firms often need both. Case management usually provides a broad overview of all materials related to a single case file. Matter management involves similar concepts but affects all activities in all cases at the same time. It is not uncommon for law firms and corporate legal departments to be involved in many different cases, often in many different locations, simultaneously.
One of the biggest benefits of a legal affairs management system is the ability to quickly and easily grasp job statistics. Most programs store data over time and can compile reports and produce category comparisons. Managers can quickly calculate how many hours were billed in a given quarter, for example, and can compare that number to the same quarter in past years. Expenses attributed to the business, project and outcome are also readily available, often with little more than a click of a mouse.
Fundamentally, legal affairs management is simply information technology management: it is the rationalization and retention of data. Such programs can be an invaluable tool for knowledge management and data accessibility. Most programs can be optimized for certain business needs, and nearly all are customized for specific law practices or departments.
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