as a matter of form

Hercules dined alone, but he understood that Admetus must as a matter of form attend the funeral and the fact did not stand in the way of his enjoying himself.

“They’ll say a few things as a matter of form, but they know they are dependent on Turkey.”

"They'll say a few things as a matter of form, but they know they are dependent on Turkey."

Quantum computers would be able to perform exponentially greater computational feats still by abandoning on-off calculative constraints as a matter of form — a kind of ultimate parallelism, if you’ll forgive that back-of-the-envelope reduction.

As a matter of form, I would like one of you to accompany me to Elmdale at once, because I must inquire into the fishing.