Matters & clients

Pollen8 Legal’s data spine: every Vault document, time entry, calendar event, and bot exchange traces back to a matter and (optionally) a client.

Clients

Two kinds — individual or organization. Stored at /admin/legal/clients. Required for matter creation. Conflict-of- interest checks search across client display name + aliases + matter parties on every new client; the result is persisted (ABA Rule 1.7 audit trail).

Matters

Created at /admin/legal/matters. Stamped with:

matter_number — tenant-unique handle. Used by the email-to-Vault gateway.
title + matter_type (litigation / m_and_a / advisory / etc.)
status — opened → in_progress → closed.
court / docket_number / jurisdiction for adversarial work.
billing_model — hourly / flat / contingency.
statute_of_limitations_date — surfaces on the matter dashboard banner when within 60 days.

Matter dashboard

Opening any matter shows an AI briefing panel at the top — a 60-100 word executive summary plus 3-5 key-issues bullets, computed on demand from matter metadata + parties + recent docs + upcoming events + Vault hits. See Matter dashboard auto-summary for how it’s built.

Parties

Stored at /admin/legal/matters/{id}/parties. Roles include opposing_counsel, judge, witness, expert, mediator. Parties feed the conflict-check index — a new client whose name fuzz-matches an existing party triggers a conflict alert.

Matter team

Add team members at /admin/legal/matters/{id}/team. Roles are lead / member / observer. Membership is what powers matter-team ACLs on the Vault — when a document’s acl_mode = 'matter_team', only users on the matter team can read it.