Legal department software
Legal department software gives an in-house legal team one system for the work the rest of the organisation sends it: requests, legal opinions, contracts, disputes, powers of attorney, memoranda and correspondence. In jaah law each piece of work is a record with its lawyers, its deadline and its history, so the team sees what is open and what is due.
It is one part of jaah law, the law firm management software, which serves legal departments as well as law firms.
Requests from across the organisation, each with its requester, type, deadline and status.
- Requester
- Type
- Deadline
- Status
Why in-house legal work needs one system
An in-house team serves the whole organisation. In the 2026 benchmarking report of the Association of Corporate Counsel and Major, Lindsey & Africa, which covers 576 legal departments in 45 countries, each lawyer supported a median of 367 of the company's employees.
- Requests arrive by e-mail, phone and in the corridor, and nobody sees the whole queue.
- The deadlines of opinions, contracts and hearings sit in personal calendars.
- A memorandum leaves the department before anyone has approved it.
- An original letter or contract leaves the archive, and nobody records who holds it.
The legal department's work, in one place
Requests from the rest of the organisation
Whoever asks for legal work, a department, a subsidiary or a person, is a contact, and its requests, opinions, contracts, cases and powers of attorney gather on that contact.
A request form can sit on a page of the organisation's website, and people with a portal account file and follow their requests there.
Each request reaches the requester's own lawyers or the intake lawyers with a deadline and a review to-do. Approving it opens a consultation, a case or an enforcement file, filled in from the request.
Rejecting a request asks for a reason from the department's own list, and the request keeps it with the date.
Legal opinions with a deadline
A legal opinion is a consultation: the question, the parties, the lawyers, the deadline, the response, the advice and the history in one record.
- The deadline is required, and the lawyer sets it.
- A new consultation gives its lawyers an approval to-do, and an approved one a drafting to-do.
- An approved consultation whose deadline has passed is marked Late by a daily job.
- The answer goes to the requester as a PDF attached to an e-mail.
- Rights decide who sees which consultations: read only, the user's own, or all of them.
Memoranda approved before they leave
Work documentation keeps each memorandum with its number, subject, type, template, author, date, text and attachments. Eight types ship, from a memorandum of claim to one of appeal, and the department adds its own.
A type can require approval and name its approvers. Sent for approval, the memorandum waits, and each approver gets a review to-do due after a set number of days. A documentation manager approves it, or rejects it with a reason.
A memorandum can name its case and hearing, its consultation or its enforcement file, and each of those lists its memoranda.
A memorandum waiting for its approver.
- Waiting for Approval
- Type
- Review to-do
Contracts and their dates
A contract keeps the agreement with its other party in one record: type, amount, start and end dates, the agreement's text and both signatures with their dates.
- The other party signs from the link in an e-mail, with no account.
- A contract is marked Expired once its end date passes.
- With the reminder on, the other party gets an e-mail before the end date, and a user the department names gets a to-do.
- Templates are the department's own, with the party's name and the amount filled in.
- A case or a consultation can name its contract.
Disputes, hearings and judgments
A case holds the organisation's role, the opposing parties, the court and its case number, the lawyers, and its hearings, evidence and judgments.
- When the department turns it on, each lawyer gets an e-mail every day with the next day's hearings.
- When a lost judgment is recorded, the case's lawyers get a to-do due a set number of days later, a reminder, not a computation of the legal deadline.
- A hearing warns when its case names no valid power of attorney for that day.
- A judgment to enforce becomes an enforcement file with its procedures, decisions, sessions and collected amounts.
- Case, hearing and judgment reports print in the organisation's own layout.
Incoming and outgoing correspondence
Each incoming or outgoing paper is recorded with its name, the related contact, its content and scanned copies, and numbered automatically, the year in the number, with no gaps.
A paper goes from Draft to Registered, and can be marked Lost, Damaged or Cancelled. Only a draft can be deleted, and the history logs each change.
Lending an original records who borrowed it, when and who lent it, and its return when it comes back. A lent paper cannot be cancelled or marked lost until it is back.
An incoming paper and who borrowed the original.
- Number
- Direction
- Registered
- Lending history
Rights, history and reports for management
- Rights are set per app and per user: read only, own files, or every file. The legal records log who changed what, and when.
- A deleted record goes to a recycle bin, where it can be restored for 30 days by default.
- Ready dashboards show each app's work, such as cases by state, court and lawyer; new ones are built without code and shared with a team.
- A user given the export right exports any list to an Excel or CSV file.
- A second sign-in step, a code sent by WhatsApp after the password, which the department turns on.
- A database of its own for each organisation.
- jaah runs the system and applies its updates: nothing to install on a server.
What jaah law does not do
- It does not file at court: it is not connected to a court system at present, and the team records hearings, judgments and decisions.
- No clause redlining and no comparison of a contract's versions.
- No connection to a government registry: each power of attorney is typed from its deed.
- No e-billing of outside counsel: no LEDES invoices and no review of law firms' bills against billing guidelines.
- No register of a group's companies, their boards and their meetings.
Questions about legal department software
What is legal department software?
Software that keeps an in-house legal team's work in one system: requests from the business, legal opinions, contracts, disputes, memoranda and correspondence, each with its lawyers, deadline and history.
How do other departments send work to the legal team?
From a request form on the organisation's website, or from the portal with an account. Each request reaches the intake lawyers with a deadline and a review to-do, and approving it opens a consultation, a case or an enforcement file.
Can a memorandum need approval before it is final?
Yes. A memorandum type can require approval and name its approvers, who each get a review to-do; a documentation manager approves the memorandum or rejects it with a reason.
Does jaah law keep a register of incoming and outgoing papers?
Yes. Each paper is numbered automatically, the year in the number, with no gaps, and a lending log records who holds each original and when it came back.
Can management follow the legal department's work?
Yes. Ready dashboards show each app's work, new ones are built without code and shared, and access rights decide who sees which files.
Does jaah law review outside counsel invoices?
No. It has no e-billing of outside counsel: no LEDES invoices and no review of law firms' bills against billing guidelines.