Dividing work and permissions in a law firm: who sees what?

The first rule: need, not rank

The short answer to “Who sees what?” is that each person sees what their work needs, not what their position allows. A senior lawyer does not necessarily need the office’s expense figures, while a new accountant may need every client’s statement of account. This is not a question of trusting the team but of organisation that protects clients and protects employees themselves: someone who never sees a figure can never be suspected of leaking it. In law firm management software, this rule turns from a verbal instruction into written settings that the partner can review at any time.

An unnecessary permission does not speed up the work, but it widens the impact of any mistake.

Before permissions: who receives, and who is assigned?

Dividing the work comes before dividing the permissions. In Murafe, every file — whether a case, a police report, a service or a consultation — carries two separate names: “Received by”, the employee who took in the client’s papers and entered the file, and “Assigned to”, the person who does the work itself: the lawyer for cases, the consultant for consultations. “Received by” is filled in automatically with the name of whoever entered the file and can be changed if a colleague received the papers, and both names appear on the file’s page and in the lists. This separation helps in three places:

• A file stays visible to the person who received it even if it is assigned to someone else, so the reception employee does not lose track of what they recorded.
• Filtering the lists by “Received by” or “Assigned to” shows how work is currently spread before any new assignment.
• Under “Statistics and reports” → “Received and assigned”, you can see how many files each employee received and was assigned during the period, and clicking any figure opens the files themselves.

Roles and the five actions

A role is a permissions template applied to a group of employees who do the same work. Your office starts with ready-made roles, such as managing partner, lawyer, consultant, accountant, secretarial staff and court representative, which it can edit, or it can create its own roles in “Roles and permissions”. Within each role, the permissions of each section are set separately, with a “Select all” button to grant the whole section. Five actions are available in the sections:

• View: sees records without changing them.
• Add: creates a new record, such as a case, a hearing or a voucher.
• Edit: changes an existing record.
• Delete: removes the record, and every deletion is recorded in the audit log.
• Print: a separate column for sections that have printouts, such as the case file summary, the hearing roll, delegation letters, fee agreements, vouchers, the statement of account and forms.

Access scope and confidential cases

A permission answers the question “What can the employee do?”; the scope answers “In which files?”. The “View cases assigned to them” permission limits what a user sees to their own cases, meaning those assigned to them or whose case team they belong to, while “View all office cases” widens it to every file. On top of the scope come finer layers for sensitive files and documents, needed by any office that handles family or commercial matters that should not pass through everyone’s hands:

• A confidential case appears only to its team members and to anyone granted the “View confidential cases” permission.
• Any document within a case can be restricted to “Specific people only”, chosen by name, so nobody else can open it, whatever their role in the file.
• “View and preview documents” and “Download documents” are separate permissions, so previewing inside the system can be allowed without downloading.
• Every view and every download of a document is recorded in the audit log with the employee’s name and the time.

Money is a separate permission

The most sensitive question in assigning permissions is usually: who sees the figures? That is why amounts do not come automatically with permission to open a file; they are granted through separate permissions. A lawyer may see a legal service in full without its fees, and an employee may see the payment vouchers linked to cases without seeing the office’s rent and salaries. This is settled once, in the role, not file by file. The most important of these permissions are:

• “View fees, amounts paid and balances”: decides who sees the amounts in services and consultations; anyone without it neither sees the fees nor changes them.
• “Receipt vouchers (payments received)” and “Payment vouchers (expenses)”: each has its own separate permissions.
• “View office expenses”: anyone without it sees only case and client expenses among the payment vouchers, and office expenses are left out of their figures.
• “Show the client’s financial account in the portal”: usually given to the accounts employee, it decides whether the client sees what they have paid, what remains and what is due.

A suggested starting matrix

The table below is an example of a starting point for a medium-sized office in Doha, not a binding template. Every office sets its roles according to how it works and the size of its team, and in a small office one person may combine two roles or more. Use it to open the discussion with the partners, then set the roles in the system to what you agree on, and review them after the first month of real use:

Exceptions: a permission for one employee

Roles cover most people, but every office has special cases: a lawyer who temporarily needs to see every case in the office while a colleague is away, a reception employee who records receipt vouchers for a while, or a trainee given view access without the right to add. Creating a new role for each case clutters the list; it is better to give special permissions to that particular employee without touching their role or their colleagues. Here are the steps:

1. In “Users”, click the “Permissions” button next to the employee.
2. Their role’s permissions appear ticked: tick a permission to add it for them alone, or untick one to withhold it from them alone.
3. An added permission shows in green and a withheld one in red; then click “Save permissions”.
4. When the special case is over, the “Reset to role permissions” button returns them to their role’s permissions.

Joining, leaving and the audit log

Permissions only protect while an account is in its owner’s hands, so the moments of joining and leaving deserve fixed steps that do not change from one employee to the next: any step forgotten here remains a gap that nobody notices until someone who should not exploits it. Every user is also signed out automatically after the period of inactivity set in the settings, so no account stays open on a device its owner has walked away from. When a new employee joins:

1. In “Users”, click “New user” and enter the name, a username in English letters with no spaces, the job title and the role.
2. For lawyers, tick the “Lawyer” option and enter their registration number, so that they appear in the responsible-lawyer lists.
3. Generate a temporary password and give it to the employee; the system asks them to change it at first sign-in before they can continue.

When an employee leaves the office, do not delete their account; deactivate it in “Users”. They can no longer sign in, and their records and work stay as they are. Then redistribute their files by changing “Assigned to” to a colleague, while “Received by” remains as a record of who originally entered each file. And if a current employee’s account is locked after 5 failed sign-in attempts in a row, the system administrator can unlock it immediately rather than waiting out the fifteen minutes.

The audit log is what makes permissions reviewable: it keeps every action with the username, the time and the device, from additions, edits, deletions and merges of duplicate files to document views, downloads and printing, by document number. Its existence alone changes behaviour: someone who knows that printing is recorded does not print what they do not need. Give access to it to those in management who need it, and review it regularly, not only when problems arise.