Managing a law firm
Day-to-day administration of a Kalivar law firm — members, billing, and dormant-firm behavior.
What you'll do
This page is the reference for running a law firm on Kalivar after it's set up. Use it to understand the firm dashboard, invite and manage members, control firm-wide settings, and recognize what changes when a firm goes dormant.
Firm dashboard
When you open your firm by slug (/your-firm-slug), you land on the firm context. From here you can reach Cases, Experts, Introductions, and Settings under the firm — every action you take in this context bills against the firm's plan, not your personal account.
The firm landing page surfaces the firm name and shows an Invite first members prompt to owners and admins until at least one member has been invited. Once your firm is active and you're using it day-to-day, your real work happens on Cases (your firm's case list), the Dashboard (firm-wide aggregate visible to owners and admins), and the org Settings sub-pages.
A few things to note about scope:
- Routes under your firm's URL belong to the firm — case visibility, billing, and member directory all derive from the URL, not your session.
- Personal-context routes (anything under your account settings) are for your own user, separate from any firm.
- If your firm subscription has lapsed, the firm surface is gated until it's reactivated. See Dormant firms below.
Inviting members
Open Settings → Members under your firm to manage the roster.
- Invite a single member. Enter the attorney's email, pick a role (member, admin, or owner), and send. They receive an invitation link by email. Once they accept and finish attorney onboarding, they appear in the members list and can post cases against the firm's plan.
- Invite a batch. Use the Batch invite tab to paste multiple emails at once when you're spinning up a team. Roles are applied uniformly to everyone in the batch; you can adjust individual roles afterward.
- Pending invitations. The members page shows outstanding invitations alongside accepted members. You can revoke an invitation from the action menu before the recipient accepts; revoked invitations cannot be redeemed.
- Removing a member. Use the action menu on a member row to remove them. Removal is immediate — they lose access to the firm context, but their case history, opinions, and audit-log entries stay intact.
Members complete attorney onboarding themselves
You're inviting the user, not provisioning them. After accepting, the invitee lands on Kalivar onboarding, picks the Attorney path, and finishes their bar credentials and address themselves. Their role inside the firm (member, admin, or owner) is independent of their attorney credentialing.
Member roles
Three roles exist on a firm:
- Owner. The firm's principal administrator. Owners can do everything an admin can do, plus the firm-wide actions an admin cannot: change member-control policies, suspend or force-logout a member, reassign a departing member's cases, export a member's case data, view the audit log, and approve any pending purchases that are above the firm's approval threshold.
- Admin. Manages members and billing day-to-day. Admins can invite, change role, remove members, and update billing (payment method, plan, and invoices). Admins do not see the member-controls policy editor or the audit log.
- Member. A practicing attorney on the firm. Members post cases, request introductions, and review opinions against the firm's plan. By default members do not see firm billing or change other members' roles, and several cross-firm and personal-context actions are restricted by the firm's member-control policy.
The role displayed beside each member in the directory corresponds to the value the platform stores; only owners and admins see the role selector inline.
Org-level billing override
Most firms run on a standard plan tier. Some run on Enterprise, which is per-organization pricing — the firm negotiates a custom rate per case, opinion, and introduction, optionally with invoiced net terms instead of per-action card charges.
When an Enterprise pricing override is in effect for your firm:
- The Pricing page under firm settings (
/your-firm-slug/settings/billing/pricing) shows the negotiated rates for every paid action, replacing the standard catalog. - If invoicing is enabled, your firm pays via monthly invoice on the agreed net-day terms (commonly net 30) rather than card-on-file.
- The override is set during Enterprise setup. Talk to Kalivar to adjust the rates or invoicing terms on an existing override — it isn't a self-serve change.
By default, only owners and admins can read the Pricing page. Owners can opt-in members to see pricing read-only via the member-controls policy if the firm wants the rates visible to attorneys posting cases.
Dormant firms
A law firm is active as long as it has at least one subscription in active or trialing state. If the subscription is canceled, fails to pay, or expires, the firm becomes dormant.
When the firm is dormant, every firm-context route except billing renders the Dormant firm gate instead of the page content. The gate shows different copy depending on who's looking:
- Owners see a direct Reactivate button that takes them to firm billing settings to fix the subscription. The body copy mentions whether the cause was cancellation, past-due payment, an unpaid invoice, or an incomplete checkout.
- Admins and members see a calmer message that names the firm owner, with a mailto: link to email the owner about reactivating. Admins and members cannot reactivate themselves.
- Everyone keeps a Switch to personal escape hatch from the gate so they can leave the dormant firm context and continue with their personal account.
Once a subscription returns to active or trialing, the gate clears on the next page load and the firm surface returns to normal. Cases, members, and history are not deleted while dormant — only access to firm-context actions is paused.
Charges do not silently fall back to a member's personal account
While a firm is dormant, paid actions members try to take are blocked at the source. The platform does not quietly route a member's case to their personal billing — the action is held until the firm reactivates or the member explicitly switches to personal mode.
Tips
- An admin can be downgraded to member from the role selector in the members table — no separate flow.
- Removing a member ends their access immediately; their case history and opinions stay associated with the firm and remain visible to other members.
- Suspending a member is reversible; removal is final. Use suspension when you're investigating something and removal once you're sure.
- Audit log and member-control policies are owner-only — admins do not see those entries even though they appear in the schema.
- Reactivating a dormant firm clears the gate immediately for owners; admins and members may need to refresh to see the firm surface return.