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 text and expressions (but not Markdown).

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 traits with the same 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.