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.

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 in this article.

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.

Tip

All users added at the Org level are billed as licensed users. Guest users that aren’t part of your Org—like co-counsel—should be added at the project level instead, which can be done in that project’s Team section.

• Disable the User
• Transfer Tasks and Cases
• Preserve Reports
• Remove the User

Disable 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.)

In the meantime, use the Account Manager tool to disable the user. This action prevents the user from logging in again—without affecting their existing assignments in Filevine. If you disable a user who is currently signed in, they will be automatically signed out after one hour. After that, they will be unable to sign back in.

Permission Required

Account Manager is an Advanced tool. To access Account Manager, you must have the Account Admin permission.

Once you have disabled the user, change their access to Guest across all their teams. This action will limit what they can see and do within Filevine until an hour has passed and they are signed out of the system.

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 need to remove a user 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. 

Preserve 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—preferably someone at your firm who isn’t likely to leave in the near future.
2. That team member should use Save As in Report Builder to save 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.

Heads Up!

A user should not be removed from the Org until their tasks and cases have been reassigned to a new user.

1. Click Setup > Member Access > Members. In the top left corner, click the main menu and select Setup from the dropdown. Choose Member Access from left side menu, and then click on the Members tab.
2. Select the user and remove them. Select the desired user in the list to open the user’s flyout. In the flyout, click Remove from Org.
   
3. Confirm the action. In the popup, confirm the action by typing “REMOVE” and clicking Remove. 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.