Workgroup

A workgroup determines the behaviour and semantics of matters in ContactsLaw.

Workgroups are used to categorise matters based on their area of law (e.g. Litigation), or a specific service offered by a business (e.g. Demand Letters). They are hierarchical, allowing child workgroups to inherit semantics from their parent workgroup, while also defining their own characteristics.

A workgroup is required to create a matter; therefore, every subscription will include at least one workgroup.

Properties

Workgroups have the following properties:

• Name
• Allowed matter types - Used to restrict the creation of certain types of matters.
• Whether to manually commence matters; i.e. do not transition to the Commenced state automatically.
• Content specification for matter descriptions
• Definitions for:
  • Members
  • Parties
  • Judicial officers
  • Custom fields
  • Checklist items

Matter Descriptions

The content specification for matter descriptions can contain a mixture of formatted text (Markdown) and expressions.

Assets corresponding to the matter, parties and fields are automatically defined for use within expressions. The naming convention for these assets is so-called "Pascal Case", where spaces and punctuation are removed from the names of roles/fields. For example, a role named "Seller's agent" would be exposed as SellersAgent. A list of the available assets is displayed in the workgroup editor in the Desktop App.

Owned Items

The following items can only be created at the workgroup level:

• Products
• Quote templates

The following items can be created at the workgroup level, as well as other levels:

• Disbursement types
• Documents (precedents)
• Document types
• Embedded content
• Policies
• Processes

Inheritance

Child workgroups inherit the definitions (e.g. for parties, fields, etc) from their ancestor(s). Inheritance is always additive, meaning that a parent workgroup can rely on the fact that all matters in its hierarchy have a common set of traits, and that no child workgroup is more permissive than its parent.

To that end, child workgroups can re-define roles and fields, as long as:

• If the original definition requires a value, the new definition must also require a value.
• If the original definition does not allow multiple values, the new definition must not allow multiple values either.

Security

A subset of the available permissions can be set for each workgroup. If not set, the workgroup inherits its permissions from the business.

Deletion

A workgroup that was created accidentally can be deleted at any time. A workgroup cannot be deleted once any substantial work has been performed within it.