Setup Guide: Teams, Members, and Roles

This article discusses the high-level best practices for user and team management in Filevine.

• Overview
• Set Up Roles
• Add Users
• Create Teams

Overview

At first glance, some of the terms used in this article (like roles and permissions) may seem interchangeable. However, in Filevine, these terms have a distinct context and meaning.

Before continuing through the remaining article content, take a look over the following terms and definitions. To learn more about the common terms found in Filevine, read our glossary.

• User: a person who can access a Filevine Org or project. Users are sometimes called members.
• Role: a title that a user holds—or the “hat” they wear—within a project. Users can have multiple roles that vary across projects. Roles are used to determine auto-task assignment.
• Permissions: the user’s level of access to view and edit data. Permissions can be assigned at the project level, Org level, and Account level. Permissions are sometimes called access.
• Team: a group of users that can be added to a project together, with pre-assigned roles and permissions.

Set Up Roles

To begin, use the Roles Setup Advanced tool to create and define the roles available within a project.

The Primary role is a built-in role in Filevine. This role is mainly used as the backup assignee for auto-tasks. In essence, if an auto-task is assigned to a specific role, but the project does not have a user in that role, the auto-task goes to the Primary instead.

Aside from the Primary, any additional roles can be added or removed as desired. Roles typically mirror job titles or responsibilities like Attorney, Paralegal, or Case Manager.

To learn more, read the Roles Setup article.

Add Users

Once you’ve set up the desired roles, use the Account Manager tool to add the desired users to Filevine. Then, use the Member Access tool to set each user’s Org-level permissions.

To learn more, read the Add or Remove Members article.

If any users need access to Advanced tools in Filevine, use the Advanced Access tab to grant access to those tools.

Create Teams

After setting up roles and adding users, use the Member Access tool to create the desired teams. The type and number of teams to create will depend on your firm’s operational preferences.

For instance, you might create phase-based teams (Pre-Litigation Team, Settlement Team, Trial Team, etc), attorney-based teams (Leticia’s Team, Rafael’s Team, etc), specialty-based teams (MVA Team, Worker’s Comp Team, Mass Tort Team, etc), or a blend of these and other categories.

Once a team is created, you can add users and assign their roles and project-level permissions. Then, you can add them to existing projects and auto-add them to future projects by type.

To learn more, read the Manage Teams article.

Best Practice: Integration Users

Integration “users” are included in Orgs to allow for integrations between Filevine and other platforms like Workato, Lead Docket, and Vinesign. These users are typically named API Integration or Filevine Integration.

As a best practice to keep your integrations functioning as expected, it’s important to make sure these integration users have Admin access to all your projects.

One approach would be to create a dedicated team for integration users, add the team to all existing projects, and auto-add them to all project types (including new ones). To learn more about adding teams to projects, read the Add to Projects section of the Manage Teams article.