Remove a User

This article discusses what to do when an employee leaves, including removing them from your Filevine Org and transferring their tasks and permissions. 

Filevine users exist independently of Orgs and are tied to one email address as well as to their tasks, notes, and other histories in projects. Because of this, a user cannot be deleted, only removed from your Org. A removed user’s notes, tasks, cases, etc. will still exist in the Org, meaning that no data will be lost when a user is removed. Since the user’s history remains in the Org, usernames and user emails should not be changed. Instead, new users should be created and old users should be removed.

Note: All users added at the Org level are billed as licensed users. Guest users should be added at the project level, which can be done in that project’s Team section.

Removing the user from the Org is the last step in the process of an employee leaving. Before removing your user, ensure that you’ve followed the steps below.

• Assess the User
• Transfer Tasks and Cases
• Reports
• Remove the User

Assess the User

So long as the user does not need to be removed immediately, best practice is to keep the user in the Org until you have transferred the user’s cases and tasks. (Filevine licensing normally allows for up to 30 days of temporarily-added additional users.) 

If you need to add a new user, refer to the article on adding new employees for this process. Once you have a user in your Org ready to take tasks and cases, proceed to transferring tasks and cases.

If you have a user who needs to be removed immediately, take control of the employee’s email address, and reset the email password and Filevine password, but keep this user in the Org until tasks and cases are transferred.

Transfer Tasks and Cases

A user’s tasks and cases should be transferred to other users before they are removed. 

To transfer a user’s tasks to another user, use the Task Utility Advanced tool. If the employee’s tasks are not being transferred to a single other user, you will need to reassign tasks manually. The easiest way to do this is to run a task report. Follow the instructions in the build a report article. Choose “List of Tasks” as your report type and limit the criteria to the user who will be leaving.

To transfer a user’s cases, use the Mass Update Permissions/Roles/Primary tool in Mass Update Permissions. 

Reports

When a user is removed from an Org, any reports they created are affected. If they created the reports that a Fusion depends on, the Fusion may need to be rebuilt from scratch in the future. If they shared reports with an entire Org, all existing and new users will always see those reports in their reports lists, unless they each archive each report.

To avoid these issues, review the user’s reports before removing them. 

For any reports that you want to keep, like reports used in Fusions or otherwise valuable reports:

1. Share the report with another team member.
2. That team member should save the report and make their own copy, which they will own.  
3. Unshare the reports from the account of the user who is being removed.

With this method, if a fusion ever needs to be edited, it won't have to be completely rebuilt.

For any reports shared with the entire Org that you do not need in the future, unshare the report.

Remove the User

Removing the user from the Org should be the last step in this process. A user should not be removed from the Org until their tasks and cases have been reassigned to a new user. 

1. Click Setup > Orgs > Members. In the top left corner, click the hamburger menu and select “Setup” from the dropdown. Choose “Orgs” from the menu on the lefthand side, and then click on the “Members” tab.
2. Open user card and click remove. Select the user card of the member you would like to remove. In the open user card window, select the “Org Admin” tab. In the bottom lefthand side of the window, you will see “Remove [user] from org and all projects.”
   
   
   When you click this text, another will open, asking you if you are sure. This action cannot be undone, and the user’s tasks, cases, and data will not be able to be transferred, so take this moment to ensure that you have completed all steps prior to this one. If you have accidentally removed the user preemptively, you can re-add them to transfer their tasks, but the team status on each case will be lost.
3. Select “Remove from Org.” If you are certain that you have transferred this user's information, select “Remove from Org.” This will remove the user.