Matter Statuses
All created matters in Matter365 are by default in
Active status. Active matters are accessible from matters page, and they represent open cases that your firm is currently working on.
At any point, you can change your matter's status to
Inactive in matter settings. This change is just changing the status, so you can filter your matters and separate Active from inactive ones, but inactive matters are still fully available to access in Matter365, just like the active ones.
You can change matter status of
Inactive matters back to
Active at any time. To do this, click on your matter to open
Matter dashboard, select S
ettings in top right corner, and
Edit matter general info.
From both
Active and
Inactive statuses, you can initiate closing a matter, which will take matter to status
Closed.
Matters in that status aren’t editable anymore and you can't open their matter dashboard. You will see them present in
Closed matters page, they will pop out in search results, but if you want to open matter dashboard to access them in Matter365, you will have to
reactivate them first. Reactivation will put them back in status
Active.
Matters in
Closed status can be archived in SharePoint. Changing status from
Closed to
Archived will ask for your confirmation and notify you that it won’t be possible to reactivate the matter again, or access it from Matter365 anymore. Upon confirmation, documents, emails and notebooks of a matter will be copied to SharePoint, and Office 365 matter group will be deleted. List of archived matters will be available in
Archived matters page, and if you need to browse any of the matters in there, you will be redirected to SharePoint location where the files are stored. This is done because the best practices of using Office 365 dictate that you shouldn't have too many open Office 365 groups, and over time, your daily work would become less organized with a lot of old matters you do not need present in various application pages. This way, you will always see only the work that is currently relevant, while still being able to access anything from the past, archived in SharePoint.
Matters in
Closed status can also be permanently deleted. Deletion will also ask for your confirmation, and upon confirmation, all matter files and Office 365 group are permanently deleted and cannot be restored.
As the image above shows, it's not possible to delete matters with existing invoices created, and delete button for them is disabled (grayed out)
All matter statuses are graphically presented in the image below, and they show a usual life cycle your matters might have.
