Using Freeboard

What a new user needs to know before the diary can be trusted. Read it once before training, then keep it open for the first week. Most sections end with short videos, recorded on the demonstration firm; open one to watch it. Everything below can be tried on the demonstration firm, which is wiped every night.

Signing in

Five wrong passwords for the same address inside fifteen minutes lock that address for fifteen minutes. Nobody can lift it early, your administrator included, and a new password does not lift it either: wait it out. If the password is the problem, your administrator can set a new one for you to use once the fifteen minutes are up.

The two dates on a task

A task can carry two dates, and they mean different things.

• The internal deadline is the firm’s own target: when you want the work done, with room to spare.
• The actual due date is the hard one: the date set by the court, the rules or the other side. Leave it empty when there is none.

A task past either date is shown as overdue until it is marked done.

Limitation and critical dates

When a task has an actual due date, Freeboard will not save it until you say whether that date is a limitation or critical date, or an ordinary one. There is no default, on purpose: an unclassified hard date is the one that gets missed.

Once a date is marked critical, only a lawyer, partner or admin can move it, and every change is kept in the task’s history with who made it and when. Where your firm has it switched on, moving a critical date or taking its flag off also asks for a reason, which the history shows beside the change. Lawyers and above can see every critical date across the firm on the limitation date register, which prints and shows the reason for each date’s last move.

Counting a deadline

On a task, choose Edit and then Compute the date from a triggering event. It takes the triggering date and a number of calendar or business days, and fills in the actual due date. It skips weekends and the days your administrator has marked as court closures. If the count lands on a closed day it says so and moves the date, and you confirm it before saving.

If your administrator has set up the firm’s court rules, pick one under Rule and it fills in the days and how to count them, and names the rule it came from. Otherwise it counts whatever days you type. Either way the list is the firm’s own, and until somebody at the firm has checked it against the rules the form says so.

Where your work shows up

The home page is today: what is late or due now, the next fourteen days, the files you are on, and what changed on them. My Work is the rest of it, in tabs.

• This Week has your Today and This Week columns. Drag what you are doing today into Priority, in the order you will do it.
• Boards is your open work, by status. Switch it to Delegated for work you gave to someone else, so it stays in sight after it leaves your desk.
• Calendar shows both dates on every task, marked Internal or Due.
• A missed internal deadline moves to today on its own and the task turns a light yellow, with the day it was missed beside it. The date saved on the task is unchanged, and an actual due date never moves.
• Done holds finished tasks. Trash appears once you have deleted one, and a deleted task can be restored from it.

Your account page can also send your deadlines to your inbox: a daily email each weekday morning with today and the next three business days, a weekly one on Monday with the whole week, or both. Limitation dates come first.

Handing work on

Assign a task to someone and it moves to their board and onto the Delegated side of your Boards tab. When a draft needs checking, send it for review to a named person from inside the task. It then sits on the reviewer’s board as theirs to act on, and on yours as waiting, until they send it back or finish it. A row tinted in the accent colour is waiting on you. Whoever it lands on, in either direction, also gets an email with a link to the task; each person can turn that off on their account page, or from the email itself.

A new assignment shows in the assignee’s bell, and they also get an email with the task’s description and a link to it, unless your admin has turned assignment emails off. On their account page each person chooses whether that includes tasks they assign themselves, or turns it off; the email has a link to turn it off too.

On a confidential file, work can only go to someone already on the file’s team: assigning, reviewing and adding a colleague to a task all refuse anyone outside it. Add them to the file first.

Files

Every task can sit on a file (a matter). A file’s page holds its team, its tasks, and its events: the mediation, the examination, the hearing. Tasks can be tied to the event they are for, so the file reads as what is coming and what has to happen before it.

A file lists each adverse party with the counsel acting for it. Add counsel puts a second lawyer, or their clerk, under the same party, and the file page shows each one on its own line.

Opening a file screens its client and every adverse party against the names already on the firm’s files. It matches names, not relationships, so it will not connect a company to the person behind it. A file marked confidential is invisible to everyone outside its team, including the fact that it exists.

Documents stay where your firm keeps them. A task, a file or an event carries links to them, each with a name, and opens them in place. Where your firm has set them up, From Google Drive and From OneDrive or SharePoint under the list let you pick the file instead of pasting its address. Either way it is a link: Freeboard does not keep a copy.

The memo to file

Under the tasks is the memo to file: dated entries recording where the file stands, calls, agreements. Entries cannot be deleted by anyone. You can revise your own, and the entry then shows that it was edited.

Where your firm has email filing turned on, each file shows its own address. Mail sent or copied there waits on the file until someone deals with it: File to memo turns it into an entry you edit first, Make a task turns it into a task on that file, and Discard removes it. Nothing an outside sender writes reaches the memo without a person at the firm filing it. The sender shown is whatever the message claims, and nothing checks it.

Where your firm has the Outlook add-in, an email you are reading has a Freeboard button. It suggests the file the email belongs to and says why, from a file number in the subject or counsel on the file, and you can pick another. File to memo drafts an entry from the email for you to edit before it is posted under your name. Make a task puts a task on your own list, with an internal deadline if you give one. A hard due date is set on the task in Freeboard, where it has to be marked limitation or ordinary. The add-in signs in on its own the first time, with the same password and two-factor code.

For lawyers and partners

Team Radar shows the whole firm’s workload by person, with who is behind. Drag a task onto another person to reassign it. Fires to Put Out lists everything across the firm that is overdue or due by tomorrow, and Deadline Load flags days carrying more than one limitation date.

Time, billing and offices

Where your firm has them switched on, any task has a Start timer button, and the running timer stays in the top bar until you stop it. Billing lists every file with time not yet billed: draft an invoice from a file, check it, and issue it, after which it is numbered and cannot be changed. Office Hoteling shows who is in which office on a day, and books one for a time range.

For the firm’s administrator

Until the firm is set up, the home page shows the administrator a short list of what is left: bring the team in, open a file, put a task on it, record a limitation date. Each step ticks itself when it is actually done.

People are added from Admin, as Staff, Lawyer, Partner or Admin. The role decides what they can see and change, and the database enforces it on every read, not only the menu. Admin is also where sections the firm does not use are switched off, and where court closures and the court rules are entered for the deadline calculator. It also decides who may open a new file, record the parties, attach documents and manage events: staff can be given any of these. Making a file confidential stays with lawyers whatever the setting.

Three task rules there are off until the administrator turns them on. One lets a partner delete any task and restore it, as an administrator can, except on a confidential file they are not on. One lets anyone who can see a task mark it done or reopen it, without changing anything else about it; the task’s history records who did. The third stops the task form asking for an estimated time. Asking for a reason when a limitation date moves is switched on or off there too.

Admin, People, Security log shows who signed in, failed to or was locked out, what was changed about members and permissions, and every file opened. Nobody can edit or delete an entry in it.

Something this page did not answer

Write to hello@getfreeboard.com. For where the data sits and what happens if something goes wrong, see Security.