Managing matter based permissions

Use matter based permissions to restrict specific users from accessing designated matters. These permissions allow your firm to:

• maintain and ensure confidentiality for certain clients
• safeguard the information of high profile clients 
• ease client concerns about confidential document storage, such as medical or financial information

Enable matter permissions

To choose who can access a certain matter, select the gear icon in the matter, then select the Permissions tab in the Matter Settings window.

Untick a name from the list to restrict the user from:

• Opening that matter
• Assigning new items to that matter
• Opening items related to that matter
• Editing items related to that matter

Once you have unticked the relevant users, select Save and the changes will immediately take effect.

Who cannot be restricted from a matter?

Note that you cannot remove the following users from a matter:

• The current user accessing Matter Settings - you cannot remove yourself
• Users with Administrator next to their name - these are the designated Firm Owners
• Users who occupy a role in the matter, such as Person Responsible, Person Assisting and Introducer
  
  • Changing these roles in Matter Info will automatically provide the updated user with permission to the matter. You will still need to untick the user's name from the Permissions tab if you wish to restrict their access.
    

What do restricted users see?

If a user does not have permission to access a matter, they will not be able to interact with the matter throughout the Smokeball desktop, web app, mobile/iPad apps and Microsoft Office.

Restricted users can search for all matters via the search bars or Matter List, but attempting to open or assign without permission results in an error message indicating that they do not have sufficient permissions to access it.

If a non-permitted user has the matter open at the moment they are restricted, they will continue to have access until they close the matter. 

Good to Know

• Matter Permissions are compatible with Smokeball version 6.5 and later. 
  • If a user is on Smokeball version 6.4 or earlier, they will have full access to matters despite being locked out. 
• Any user can set up permissions on a matter. 
• Any permitted user can change the permissions that are set. 
• Firm Owners will always have access to all matters, as they cannot be unselected from the Matter Permissions setting. 
• New users that are added to the firm will have full access to all matters.