Who can use this feature?
👤 Organization Administrators
The list of departments is entirely customizable and allows you to replicate your organization's department structure within the LawVu application. Then, when you create a matter or contract, you can link that with the correct department. This, in turn, can provide departmental reporting on workload, budgets, and more.
In this article:
Setting up and managing departments
Departments are usually set up during onboarding when you become a LawVu customer. But these can be reconfigured at any time.
Click the Organization settings icon at the bottom left menu (available only for Org Administrators), then go to Settings / Departments.
From here, you'll see the list of departments already available for your organization. The list is ordered alphabetically.
Adding a new department
Click the +Add department button / Give your new department a name / Enter budget information if applicable / press the Enter key to create your department.
Change department details
Select a department from the list on the left to change its title and yearly budget information.
Click on the ellipses menu next to each department to move it between sub-departments and top-level departments. Note that the list per group is ordered alphabetically.
From here, you can also delete existing departments.
Sub-departments
To add a sub-department, hover over the department on the left and click the Plus button.
Assigning matters to departments
LawVu is very flexible about how you can create matters. We don't enforce the need to tie a matter to a department. However, we recommend that you do this as it will enable you to run additional reports.
Depending on how you have configured your matter types with the various fields available, you may or may not see the dropdown list of departments when you create or edit a matter.
If the department list is not visible when you create a matter, check to see if that field has been added to your matter type. Go to Organization Settings > Matter Management > Matter types.
Look for the field on the various forms (Matter details, create, etc.) and then ensure that the checkboxes for every form you want the 'department' field to appear on are ticked.
If it does not appear on any of the forms, it may not have been added to your form. You can add it from the LawVu fields in the Field Library on the right-hand side. For more information on how to assign fields to contract/matter types, please click here.
How to filter your matter list by department
If you have assigned matters to various departments, you can filter your matter grid by those departments and save the filtered view for easy reference later.
If you would like to know more about how to filter your matter grid, you can click here.