Legal case management

Legal case or matter management software has two primary functions: it helps to better use, manage, consolidate, share, and protect information, and it tracks and shapes the business process. Because the most useful forms of such software can integrate data from multiple systems, departments, users, and business entities, its use can increase a firm's business advantage.

Case or matter management systems having the capacity to push and pull data over the Internet, whether within the software itself or within an integrated software framework or environment became an industry standard with the advent of the Lexis and Westlaw legal research platforms.

Case management software is marketed to specific segments of the legal marketplace, with some products designed for small firms and others for large multinational firms, and a few claim to be scalable to all. Cost-containment and competition concerns facing small-to-mid-size firms that cannot afford a full-time IT staff often drive custom solutions incorporating multiple integrated products.

In-house legal teams (in the public and private sectors) have their own needs: generally these require less emphasis on billing and accounts (since clients tend to be internal), and even more on traceability, real-time integration and configurability. The need to improve productivity of the team and reduce costs to taxpayers, or the business, is often a key driver. Some in-house teams have reduced their external legal bills by using case management software to increase their capacity and bring case work in-house.[3]

As electronic court systems continue to increase their online presence, many now require case filings to be accomplished electronically.[4][5] Many legal software vendors' products include the ability to take advantage of such electronic filing by pulling data from the case management product and pushing it into court filing systems.

Legal-project management meets traditional project management particularly in the area of electronic discovery.[6] E-discovery in particular has a set of regularized, repeatable, and measurable practices and has been subject to great cost-control pressure for the past few years, making it a specialty within law amenable to traditional project management. The practice of legal-project management varies from the schema in Steven Levy's book[2] to law-firm-specific regimens such as Seyfarth Lean[7] to corporate initiatives such as Cisco’s core-and-context[8] approach to legal work.

In litigation, the discovery process often results in enormous amounts of information that must be managed, and with the revision of the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 2006 to include electronic means of discovery[9] came a new subset of case management systems that incorporated those changes, often dubbed 'electronic evidence' or 'e-discovery' management systems.[10][11] Since the new rules took effect, e-Discovery firms as outside service vendors have flourished.

The term case management is also used to refer to systems in which court or tribunal officials assume closer administrative control over the litigation process than is traditionally associated with common law litigation.[12] The Assisted Dispute Resolution program was introduced into the Federal Court in 1990 after a number of cases failed to reach resolutions having several directional hearings. In those cases the parties were not able to isolate the issues requiring determination. With the new program, judges can refer the parties to a court registrar for mediation. This is stated in the Federal Court of Australia Act 1976 Section 53A(1):[13]

(1) Subject to the Rules of Court, the Court may by order refer the proceedings in the Court, or any part of them or any matter arising out of them, to a mediator or an arbitrator for mediation or arbitration, as the case may be, in accordance with the Rules of Court. (1A) Referrals under subsection (1) to a mediator may be made with or without the consent of the parties to the proceedings. However, referrals to an arbitrator may be made only with the consent of the parties.

Case management in the State of New South Wales includes governing civil court proceedings by court management rules, which are the Civil Procedure Act 2005 (NSW) and Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 2005 (NSW). The overriding purpose of case management in the Civil Procedure Act 2005 is 'to facilitate the just, quick and cheap resolution' to the matter at dispute in the civil court proceedings (s56(1), Civil Procedure Act 2005 (NSW) ).

In Australia, mediation as an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) method is designed to avoid resorting to formal court-based adjudication and is now also being applied to criminal matters. Traditional theories of criminal justice view the matter as one between the offender and the state.[14]

It is not necessary to have the parties consent to the mediation process and a judge can direct the mediation. In this sense, case management is designed to identify and define issues in dispute and to reduce delays, costs and unnecessary pre-trial activities.

[W]hat was born of resistance and opposition to the formal justice system has been extensively integrated and co-opted into the system.[15]