Choosing in-house legal software is one of the most important decisions you'll make as a
General Counsel or legal ops leader. Get it right, and your team gains visibility, efficiency, and
data to prove your value. Get it wrong, and you've added another tool nobody uses to a tech
stack that's already gathering dust.
The software market for in-house legal teams
I founded Xakia because in-house teams were stuck between two bad options: overpriced enterprise platforms that take months to implement, or consumer tools that don't understand legal workflows. This guide walks you through the six core categories of in-house legal software, what to look for in each, and how to build a tech stack that serves your team effectively.
Most in-house teams operate in the dark. Matters are scattered across shared drives and email. Contracts are buried in silos. Legal spend is tracked in Excel. Intake happens via phone calls and ad hoc emails. And you have zero visibility into how your department actually performs. The result: your lawyers are buried under glorified admin work instead of focused on strategic work.
The six categories of in-house legal software
Modern legal software isn't one thing. It's a collection of specialized tools that solve specific problems. Understanding these six categories helps you build a technology stack that fits your team's workflow, rather than forcing your workflow into generic software.
Matter Management
Matter management is the foundation. This is where cases, files, and day-to-day work are organized, tracked, and managed. A solid matter management system gives you visibility into what's active, what's moving, and what's stuckYou move from reactive to proactive: instead of asking where matters stand, you can see exactly what's happening and how long work typically takes.
Document Management
Document management is different from automation. It's about storing, organizing, retrieving, and managing the lifecycle of existing documents and emails, providing a centralized repository for your contracts, agreements, communications, and case files so nothing gets lost and everything is searchable. This matters because documents scattered across drives and inboxes are effectively invisible and impossible to track.
Contract Management
Contract management focuses on where agreements live, how you track key lifecycle dates, and what you know about obligations. A contract repository centralizes all agreements in a single searchable location with expiry alerts and renewal tracking. AI is changing this category fast. Contract review tools can now ingest an agreement and align it against your playbook in minutes, while AI-powered key terms extraction pulls out the details that matter without manual review.
Xakia offers a robust contract repository, key lifecycle tracking, approval workflows, plus AI contract review and key terms extraction. While advanced negotiation automation is not yet available, Xakia solves the core problems most in-house teams face: contracts scattered everywhere and renewal dates missed.
Legal Spend Management
Most in-house departments have no idea what they're spending on legal work. Spend management software consolidates invoices from external counsel, shows you where money is going, and reveals patterns: overspending with particular vendors, matter types that are more expensive than expected, and opportunities for vendor consolidation. This matters because it drives both visibility and accountability.
Legal Intake and Triage
For most in-house teams, managing how legal receives work is a major pain point. Without a system, legal requests arrive from all directions: via email, Slack, phone calls, and word-of-mouth. This creates chaos: urgent matters mixed with routine ones, context lost, and priorities unclear. Intake software creates a legal front door where requesters fill out a form, and the system captures important information upfront, allowing matters to route automatically based on your rules.
Upgrading from email inboxes into a structured intake and triage process helps eliminate bottlenecks and provides your team with critical data on the types of work consuming your time.
Legal Analytics and Reporting
You can't optimize what you can't measure. Legal analytics pulls data from your matter management, contracts, intake, and spend systems and turns it into insights. The best platforms now include AI-powered search, so you can ask questions in plain language ("which matters took the longest to close last quarter?") instead of building reports manually. You see trends: Are employment matters increasing? Is external counsel spending growing? This drives both efficiency and strategy.
How to choose the right software for your team
Start with your biggest problem
If you're drowning in matters and can't see what's happening, start with matter management. If contracts are scattered everywhere, start with contract management. If intake is chaotic, start with legal intake and triage. Pick the category creating the most pain right now. That's where you'll see immediate ROI.
Evaluate for integration and adoption
If you have multiple pain points, you have two options: 1) an integrated, all-in-one solution; or 2) best-of-breed. If you select option two, ensure the systems talk to each other. When evaluating software, ask about integrations, APIs, and data portability. More importantly, test it with your team. Is the interface intuitive? Does it require much training? Will busy lawyers actually log in daily? Software only works if people use it. In-house software is different from law firm tools. Look for systems designed for corporate counsel, not adapted from law firm tools.
Think about total cost of ownership
An integrated all-in-one platform with subscription pricing per user often costs less than multiple point solutions with module-based pricing. You save on implementation time (usually 2-4 weeks for smaller teams) and avoid paying for separate integrations. When evaluating options, compare the full cost: software, implementation, training, and ongoing support. A faster implementation saves money and gets you value sooner.
Why we built Xakia as an all-in-one platform
I was frustrated watching in-house teams piece together disparate tools and lose months to implementation projects. Most vendors build platforms for law firms first, then repurpose tools for corporate teams. The workflows are wrong. The pricing is wrong. The assumptions about how you work are wrong.
We designed Xakia specifically for in-house counsel from day one. The platform covers matter management, document management, contract repository and tracking, legal spend management, intake and triage, and analytics. Xakia is an all-in-one integrated system with subscription pricing per user, not module-based pricing. This matters because integrated means faster implementation (2-4 weeks), fewer integrations to manage, and lower total cost.
Xakia is ISO 27001, SOC2, and HIPAA compliant. We're also the only multi-lingual matter management platform on the market, supporting English, Spanish, Japanese, and French. For global teams managing work across regions and languages, that's a real requirement, not a nice-to-have.
We're honest about what we do and don't do. We handle contract repository and tracking. We don't handle full contract lifecycle management with advanced negotiation automation and template logic. Most in-house teams don't need that complexity. They need contracts organized, key dates flagged, and renewals tracked. We solve that problem extremely well.
FAQs
Your next step
In-house legal software isn't optional anymore. Teams without it are slower, less visible, more likely to miss deadlines, and completely blind to where money is going.
You don't need to solve everything at once. Pick your biggest problem. Identify the software category that solves it. Request demos from three vendors. Let your team pilot the software. Commit to it for six months before evaluating what's next.
The right software transforms how your team works. Your lawyers do legal work instead of administrative work. Your business gets faster answers. Your risks get managed better. Your costs become visible. And your team gets relief from grinding manual processes.
Start this week. Identify your biggest pain point. Request vendor demos. Involve your team in evaluation. Then pick one tool and make it work.
Learn more
To learn more about specific categories, check out our guides to legal matter management software, contract lifecycle management, legal spend management, legal intake and triage, and legal data analytics. You might also find it helpful to read about enterprise legal management and what makes legal operations successful.
