Matters

What belongs in a matter#

A matter is the central legal object. It contains the durable context required to execute and review legal work later: title, matter number, practice area, matter type, status, priority, confidentiality, jurisdiction, client, responsible attorney, documents and evidence, participants, notes, legal workflow state, reviews, approvals, generated legal documents, timeline, and audit trail.

Everything on a matter should help answer one of two questions: what must happen next in this legal matter, or how did we get here?

Matter workspace is the primary product surface#

The frontend matter workspace includes overview data, documents and evidence, participants, tasks, legal review tasks, workflow progress, timeline, AI activity, communication, and audit records. Some sections are empty until the relevant workflow, document, or agent activity creates data.

Matter states stay aligned with the workflow engine#

Operational MatterStatus values remain open, pending, processing, completed, failed, closed, and archived so Temporal and the existing workflow runtime are not forked. The legal lifecycle stage (intake, triage, open, active, under_review, awaiting_approval, ready_for_delivery, delivered, closed, archived) is stored on the matter and derived from workflow/review gates where applicable. See Legal Matter Lifecycle for stage meanings and mapping rules.

Use documents and participants deliberately#

Matruno supports matter-scoped documents, evidence, attachments, extracted document context, matter participants, and generated legal documents. Use Documents to keep evidence close to the matter. Retrieval is workspace-scoped and matter-isolated.

Matters can run in manual or auto execution mode. Auto mode may launch the legal workflow after creation, but it still pauses for attorney review and approval wherever the workflow requires those gates.