When setting up billing for your Actionstep Practice Management system, you must choose which participant type will be designated as the "responsible lawyer". This role has special functionality in Practice Management for things like fee allocation and reporting. Typically, it is the person who is responsible for the overall outcome of the case.
If billing is enabled for a matter type, the participant type that has been designated as the responsible lawyer for your firm must be configured in the matter type's Parties section. In the example below, if you've designated that the Lawyer role should be assigned as the Responsible Lawyer (1), Lawyer should be listed as a required party in the matter type's settings (2). (See Creating and Editing a Matter Type (Admin) for help in setting up parties.)
If you assign more than one contact to this role for a specific matter, the first person loaded will be assigned the responsible lawyer role. For example, if the responsible lawyer field is set to the Partner role, and the matter has both Jenn and Jacob assigned as partners, Jenn will be listed as the responsible lawyer since she is the first contact loaded to that role.
TIP: When there is no participant defined for a particular matter, it will fall back to the assigned-to participant as the responsible lawyer.
If aliases have been enabled in your system, you can change the term "responsible lawyer" to something that better suits your firm's workflow. For example, you may have a supervising partner assigned to each matter. For these situations, you could use the term Supervising Partner rather than Responsible Lawyer. See the "Participant Type Setup" section in Configuring Your Billing Settings (Admin) for instructions on setting this alias.
TIP: To view who the responsible lawyer is for a specific
matter, click the information icon next to the matter name. The person responsible
is listed next to Assigned to.
To learn more about setting up the responsible lawyer role, see Configuring Your Billing Settings (Admin).
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