Organize Your Cases as Matters

Most of your day runs around a case, not a feature. Matters gives each case a single home inside Niyam, so hearing dates, proceedings, and the work you produce for that case stay together rather than scattered across notebooks, forwarded emails, and folders on your desktop.

What changed

Matters is a new section in your workspace. Each matter acts as a dedicated case file that you build up over the life of the brief, from the first appearance through to the final order.

• Create a matter with the cause title, parties, court, case number, and jurisdiction. The basic identity of the case is captured from the start.
• Record proceedings as they happen. Note what was argued, what the court directed, and what is pending for the next date.
• Set and update the next hearing date so it stays visible at the top of the matter file rather than buried in a separate calendar or sticky note.
• Link research answers, drafted documents, and notice analyses to the matter so the complete output of your work on a case lives in one place.
• Add your internal diary or file number and a short description so you can locate the matter quickly when a client calls or a court clerk asks for the status.

How to use it

1. Open Matters from the left sidebar and select New matter.
2. Enter the cause title — for example, Mehta v. State of Maharashtra — along with the court and jurisdiction.
3. Add the case number once it is allotted by the registry.
4. Set the next hearing date, then return after each appearance to add a short proceeding note covering what transpired, what was filed, and what the court said next.
5. From any research answer, drafted document, or notice you produce in Niyam, choose Link to matter to file it under the right case.
6. Open the matter any time you need the full picture — parties, history, upcoming date, and everything you have produced — without having to reassemble it from memory.

Why it matters

Before a hearing, you typically need several things at once: the last order, a summary of what was argued previously, and whatever you drafted or researched since. Gathering all of that from a mix of notebooks, inbox searches, and desktop folders takes time that a busy morning before court simply does not have.

A matter brings those pieces together so you open the file, see the thread of the case, and are already prepared rather than still assembling. After each appearance you spend two minutes adding a note, and the record stays current without any separate diary-keeping on the side.

It also changes how a chamber handles a brief. When a junior or co-counsel picks up the file, the matter already carries the dates, the proceedings history, and the linked work. The briefing becomes a confirmation rather than a reconstruction from scratch, which matters when time is short and several matters are running in parallel the same week.

For long-running litigation with many rounds of proceedings, a matter becomes a continuous record. Years of appearances, research, and produced documents sit in one thread rather than a growing collection of folders with inconsistent naming and no easy way to search across them.

Good to know

• Matters are private to your workspace and visible only to your team members.
• A single matter holds an unlimited number of linked items, so the longest-running litigation stays in one continuous file.
• You can rename, archive, or delete a matter at any time. Archiving keeps the record accessible without cluttering your active list once a brief concludes.
• Work linked to a matter remains available on its own even if the matter is later removed, so nothing you produced is ever lost.
• The task feature within a matter lets you track specific action items for that case — documents to file, research to complete, deadlines to watch — keeping your to-do list alongside the case record rather than in a separate system.