Context
We're often asked by legal practitioners to outline how they might be able to use Vendorable in conjunction with another legal practitioner. This can be for a variety of reasons:
Joint ownership of property
Court orders
Mediated settlements
and we see this across a number of types of legally represented property sale matters:
Estate administration property sales arising from a wills and estates where a property is being sold;
Family law matters where matrimonial property separation is being undertaken; and
Insolvency where liquidator or receiver may have been appointed over an organisation and the assets include property.
What is the best approach?
We'll assume in this article that you have:
Created your account (by verifying your email)
Created your profile (by submitting the details)
and now you're attempting to work out how to work with a counterparty.
Create a custom team
The first step is to create a custom team.
This team is going to include only those legal representatives who can act on the file. It won't include the clients. They will be added as a stakeholder or signing party later.
Navigate to your profile and click on the accordion called "Teams and teammates":
then click "New Team", and a new team form will be brought up:
In the various boxes you should:
Give the team a description: typically this would be a matter description so ABC & XYZ
Add a team email if there is a shared inbox. Though if you're working with another firm, you should leave this blank.
Add Authority emails these are individuals who can sign an Electronic Agency Agreement on behalf the matter, so if you are acting as power of attorney for a client you can put your email in here.
Add Member emails, these are individuals who can work on a file, but they do not have contractual powers.
What do I do with my clients?
Great question.
Clients are added as Stakeholders later on transactions.
They have specific powers for each property. Acknowledging that sometimes although lawyers see across all properties and matters, a client's powers with respect to a particular asset may differ from another.
Can the counter party solicitor change the team?
Yes, but only if they're an Authority email.
So if your opposing counsel has a senior person, and some more junior team members. Perhaps only put the senior person into the Authority email, and put anyone else in as a Team member.
Now what do I do?
Now it's time to request services. In most cases that will mean requesting Sales appraisals via:
creating a property; and
going to market for services
However, now that you've created a custom team for your matter, when you Create a property you'll be able to add this custom team over this asset.
Can the other lawyers now see all my matters?
So as an example if one property fell out of the marital pool for example, but you still were assisting a client with disposing it, then you could add a different team (with your client in it) to that property.
The lawyer colleagues you added in this new custom team wouldn't be able to see it, because only you and your client are on this new team.