If you want to manage your legal matters better, a matter management system should be an excellent investment - if you're prepared to invest the time to set it up and use it properly.

However, if you're really just looking for a better way to use SharePoint and file your emails and documents, a matter management system is a costly way to go about it. There are better options at much lower costs.

I'm a fan of matter management systems. Over the past 5 years, the leading platforms have developed into very comprehensive solutions that offer a lot of functionality.

One of the things they can do is help legal teams file and manage emails and attachments.

This is obviously something that legal teams find attractive, as we've had several conversations with in-house lawyers where they've been looking to get a legal matter management system primarily for email management.

However, it would be an incredibly expensive way to solve this problem because they don't have a plan for how they will use all the other, main, functionality of the matter management system.

If you're in this situation, look at what the team at OnePlace Solutions are doing with OnePlace Mail. It's a solution with a lot of functionality, as you can see in their webinars on Do you need to simplify your email management and Five ways to Manage Legal Matters with Microsoft 365. It also comes at a much lower price!

It's not just for the legal team and matter management. If email and document management is a challenge across your organisation, it could be adopted more widely.

We've been looking for ways to improve our own email and document management at LawHawk and have recently adopted OnePlace. At the same time, we're also setting up a new SharePoint structure which we'll use OnePlace to save our emails and documents into. It's early days, and we're taking it slow to ensure we get it right, but at this stage (and having migrated over 12,000 emails to SharePoint), I'm impressed with both the technology and the support we've received from OnePlace. I'll have more to share as we progress our project further.

None of this is to suggest that you shouldn't also look at what you can get from the leading matter management systems like Lawvu, Lawcadia and Xakia, but you do need to make sure you're ready to use all their core functionality to ensure you get a great return from your investment. 

If you'd like to know more about OnePlace or the leading matter management platforms, and what options might be best for you and your team, contact me for a chat.