Matter Maintenance

There may be an occasion where a matter may need to be moved from one attorney to another, or an attorney may leave and all of their matters will need to be re-assigned. In the navigation pane, select Settings and there will be an option named “Matter Maintenance”. It is in this section where we can re-assign a matter, appointment/event, or task. If we want to change the owner of matter to another person, we can click on the Reassign Owner tab and we are directed to this page:

There are several ways to reassign ownership of a matter. We can add expression and choose matter number --> contains --> input matter number.  If we want to change all ownership of all matters that belonged to a specific attorney, we can add expression, choose matter owner --> equal to --> search for attorney’s name in the dropdown menu. We then select the matters we want, select ‘owner from’ and find that attorney’s name again and reassign ownership to whoever is taking over that attorney’s matters.

When reassigning ownership of a matter, all events and tasks that were under the ownership of that owner automatically also change. Reassigning events and tasks work in similar ways. However due to the fact that the matter owner automatically is added as an event attendee, that attendee remains intact. If we want to reassign the previous matter owner from being an attendee also, we now go to the second tab, Reassign Appointments, and carry out that function there in the same manner that we reassigned owner. We can select Event Attendee --> Equal To --> select attendee (in this case, happens to be the previous matter owner), and press Apply. From there we can select all events that we wish to reassign the attendee from by clicking on Change Type: Replace an Attendee, and selecting the previous event attendee from the dropdown and selecting the new attendee from the dropdown and clicking on Submit. Reassigning Tasks works in the same manner.

In the situation where perhaps an attorney has a new assistant, we go into Reassign Appointments tab, Matter owner --> select the attorney from the dropdown menu --> press Apply. From there we can add an attendee --> add the assistant from the dropdown menu --> Submit.

If an assistant changes, we can reassign them in the reassign appointments and tasks tabs, and replace that attendee for events and tasks.  

It is important to note that making any of these changes in matter maintenance automatically adds the users to the ethical wall of the matter. However, in the reverse scenario, if someone is removed from certain events or tasks, they are not automatically removed from the ethical wall, so that will have to be done manually.