As the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey collects increasingly fuller data about law departments and the matter management systems they use, I decided to bring up to date my posts on that software. Previously I collected three dozen posts (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: matter management systems with 35 references.). Since then, there have been almost twice as many more, which I have divided into four posts to be published over the next few days.
Law departments license and implement matter management systems for many reasons. Many of my posts within a year or so after mid-2008 mention advantages to users of that common genre of software (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: save money –“matter management” vs “legal spend management”; May 20, 2009: keep audit trails of changes; June 1, 2009: report accruals; May 6, 2009: reduce costs; June 29, 2009: support productivity measurement; Nov. 5, 2009: reduce 36% of outside counsel spend; and Dec. 30, 2009: spot trends from data.).
The past two years saw even more references to the benefits of matter management software (See my post of Jan. 28, 2010: monitor alternative fees; Feb. 10, 2010: visualize and make sense of voluminous data; Feb. 10, 2010: report and analyze; March 1, 2010: track metrics to learn from benchmarks; May 30, 2011: produce a variety of reports; Feb. 15, 2009: report on collected data; Feb. 15, 2010: rank complexity or value of matters; Jan. 24, 2010: group contracts by complexity; May 28, 2010: collect data on outside counsel spend and matters; June 11, 2010: expedite the work flow for invoices; June 23, 2011: understand fees through UTBMS codes; and June 14, 2011: reduce total legal spending.).