What user roles and permissions does LeanLaw support?

LeanLaw’s Pro plan includes precise user permissions, giving a firm control over who sees and does what inside the system. Getting that right starts with four questions about who touches money, matters, and clients — answering those comes before deciding what to turn on.

Who needs to see money, and who doesn’t

Every firm has people who should see billing rates, fee arrangements, and client balances, and people who only need to log time against a matter without seeing any of that. Precise user permissions, available on Pro, exist to make that separation possible. The harder part is deciding where that line actually falls at your firm, since it rarely lines up neatly with job title — a senior contract timekeeper might reasonably need less visibility than a newer associate handling client communication. Firms working through a narrower version of this same boundary, specifically around billing rates, may find that question worth reading on its own.

Who’s producing invoices, and who’s only logging time

A second, separate line sits between people who draft or send a bill and people who only feed time and expenses into the system. Some firms want one billing coordinator with sole control over what goes out the door; others want every originating attorney reviewing their own matters before a bill ships. Neither answer is more correct. They’re different views of how much oversight a firm wants between “time entered” and “invoice sent,” and permissions are what make either answer enforceable rather than aspirational.

Take a hypothetical firm where every attorney can send an invoice directly to a client without any review step. That might be exactly right for a two-partner shop where each partner owns their own book. It’s very likely wrong for a firm with a much larger roster of timekeepers and one name on the letterhead accountable for what every client receives — not because any individual timekeeper is careless, but because nobody is currently positioned to catch the one invoice that isn’t ready.

Firm-wide visibility or matter-by-matter access

The third question is scope: does a given person need to see everything happening across the firm, or only the matters they’re actually assigned to? Take a hypothetical firm with one billing coordinator and timekeepers split across three practice groups. If everyone can see every matter’s rates and every client’s balance, that isn’t a problem until the day it becomes one — someone leaves for a competitor, a client conflict surfaces, or a number gets mentioned somewhere it shouldn’t. Matter-by-matter access is how a firm decides that scope in advance rather than after an incident forces the question.

The fourth question has less to do with software and more to do with the firm: is this person a long-term employee, or a contractor, a temp, or someone tied to a single matter? Access that fits a permanent employee often fits badly on someone with a shorter, narrower relationship to the firm, and precise permissions let those two groups be treated differently instead of identically.

Why this connects to utilization, not just access control

Permissions aren’t only a security question. A timekeeper who can’t see their own outstanding time against a matter, or a supervising attorney who can’t see work in progress across a practice group, is one step removed from acting on it — and unbilled work that nobody with visibility is watching is exactly what utilization measures poorly. The access question and the “who’s watching the numbers” question tend to be the same question asked from two directions.

What this depends on

• Firm size and how many distinct practice groups or offices you run.
• Whether timekeepers, paralegals, and contract staff need a different level of access than partners or the billing coordinator.
• Which plan you’re on, since precise permissions is a Pro-level capability.
• How often your firm’s staffing actually changes, since access has to be revisited as people join, leave, or change roles.

Before you configure anything

Decide first what counts as sensitive at your firm — billing rates, client balances, firm-wide financial dashboards — and only then decide who’s exempt from seeing it. Starting from who’s already trusted tends to recreate whatever access pattern already exists, sensitive information included.

The four questions above don’t have universal answers, and that’s the point. A two-partner firm and a much larger, multi-office firm can both be on the same plan and land in completely different places on all four, because the underlying variable in every case is how the firm itself is structured, not what the software allows.

Related questions

Are all of these tabs something that’s set up by user permissions? Not everyone needs to see what clients are getting what bills. Whether a person can see which bills are going to which clients is exactly the kind of thing precise permissions, on the Pro plan, are built to control. Where that line sits for your firm depends on the money-visibility question above, not on a default.

Can you customize what the user sees when they log in? We have a lot of users who will only enter time. Yes, in the sense that a time-entry-only user’s daily experience can be set up to exclude billing and firm financial data entirely. That separation is what Pro-level permissions are for.

And can individuals enter snippets? That’s a time-entry question rather than a permissions one, and it doesn’t change who can see billing information once time is logged. The permission question is about visibility, not about what a time entry itself can contain.