Jira Core for Law Firms - is it a good fit and pro tips?

[Rauno Kinkar]

We are a medium sized Law Firm here in Estonia and are thinking of JIRA CORE as a work flow management tool. We have a lot of clients who are developers and as such it seems like a good fit.

I have been testing JIRA CORE for about a week now and it does seem like a good tool. However, it seems like it would be a lot of help to have access to a "how-to-guide" that centers specifically on customising JIRA CORE for Law Firms - common customisations, how to manage confidential cases, suitable workflows for court cases, contracts and memos etc.

I wanted to find out if there are other Law Firms out there who have actually adopted JIRA CORE and what are their experiences. Any pro-tips are welcome.

[Rachel Wright]

Hi @Rauno Kinkar - yes, Jira can definitely support Legal teams!  I always recommend to companies that in addition to onboarding the usual teams to Jira (Development, Marketing, etc.) that we also set up other teams like Legal, Finance, Facilities, HR, etc.  Instead of bugs and features, Legal team is tracking contracts, agreements, litigation, and internal team "to do" items.  Jira can track anything whether it's your contract review process or your craft beer collection!

In fact, I briefly mention a sample Legal workflow, for contract review, in one of my online training classes.  This workflow is purposefully super simple, but it's easy to see how Jira can support the work your team does too.

Also, you mentioned confidential cases.  Jira has the ability to restrict viewing per project (ex:  all the data in the entire Legal area) or per individual issue.  There are lots of options to make sure confidential data stays that way.  One common model is:  restrict viewing of issues to (1) your internal team (can view all), (2) the reporter (can only view issues they've filed, and (3) to users specifically added on an individual issue basis.  I hope that makes sense.

Thanks for posting to the Community!  I'm sure you'll get a lot of good ideas here.

Rachel Wright
Author, Jira Strategy Admin Workbook

[Tom Lister]

Hi @Rauno Kinkar

I've worked in finance environments where I've build  business workflows for front office and middle office teams. They've used JIRA Core workflows to process events for compliance purposes such as P&L sign offs, regulatory reporting such as Volcker. This is not quite law but close enough that you can feel comfortable about going down this route.

One of the security aspects was that each dealing desk reporting P&L could not are see the figures from other desks. JIRA handled this easily via Security Level settings. We also had multiple compliance projects in the same JIRA server and were able to separate the user access with project roles.

One thing I have found is that many non-IT use cases need extra features to implement. i.e. scripted workflow conditions.

Enjoy the journey, keep posting questions :-)