Roles & participation taxonomy

The word “role” means several different things in Athenty depending on what is being related to what. To keep them straight — and to stop the loan, estate, accounting, and permission engines from cross-wiring — Athenty uses five distinct axes. This page is the single canonical reference for all of them; the surfaces that consume each axis are cross-linked from the table.

The five axes

Axis	What it is	Fixed / editable
Involvement	A participant’s relationship to a matter — Client / Counterparty / Third-party (Assigned staff is the fourth involvement)	Fixed
Matter Role	The role within that involvement — Buyer, Seller, Lender, Borrower, Guarantor, Executor, Estate Trustee… Loan and estate parties both live here.	Managed list — org-editable; a role locks on use once your firm uses the loan/estate module that relies on its exact name (see below)
Staff Function	How an assigned staff member relates to a matter — Matter Introducing / Matter Responsible / Matter Assigned	Fixed (accounting permissions)
Authorized-rep role	How a person ties to an entity (matter-independent) — Director, Officer, Shareholder, Trustee…	Fixed system list — orgs can’t edit
Access Level	A staff member’s org permissions — Owner / Admin / Manager / General (+ HR / Compliance / Bookkeeping add-ons). This is not a “role”.	Fixed (Access Levels)

There is no “matter sub-role”

Earlier drafts referred to a participant’s role within an involvement as a “matter sub-role”. The canonical term is simply Matter Role. Loan parties (Borrower / Guarantor / Lender) and estate parties (Executor / Estate Trustee / Attorney for Property / …) are all Matter Roles — there is no separate party vocabulary.

Involvement → Matter Role (the participant hierarchy)

Every non-staff participant on a matter is grouped first by Involvement (a fixed top-level set), then carries a Matter Role drawn from the org’s managed list:

Participant
├─ Client          ─┐
├─ Counterparty     ├─ carry a Matter Role  → [ Buyer · Seller · Lender · Borrower · Guarantor · Executor · … ]
├─ Third-party     ─┘
└─ Assigned staff   → carry a Staff Function → [ Matter Introducing · Matter Responsible · Matter Assigned ]

The Matter Role managed list is edited at Settings ▸ Managed Lists ▸ Participants ▸ Roles and is consumed by the Matter detail ▸ Participants tab.

Matter Roles that lock on use

Every Matter Role is firm-editable — legal practice is jurisdiction-specific, so each org can add, rename, archive, and reorder the roles it needs. There is no role that is locked by name: until your firm actually uses the module that reads a role by name, that role is as editable as any other.

A role locks the moment your firm starts relying on it. When your org opens its first Loan matter, the three roles the loan engine matches — Borrower, Guarantor, Lender — lock. When your org opens its first Estate matter, the estate roles the module relies on lock. From that point a locked role is:

• Non-renamable — its name is fixed (the engine matches it by name),
• Non-deletable — it can’t be archived.

The lock is per-org and stored (the row’s is_system flag), set the first time the module runs for your org — not a global name list. An org that never opens a loan or estate matter keeps every one of these roles fully editable. Orgs may always add their own custom roles and edit or delete the roles they added themselves. Locked roles show a System badge in the managed-list UI, with rename/delete affordances disabled (the API rejects the change too, with a MANAGED_LIST_ITEM_LOCKED error).

When the module first runs it adopts any same-named role you already have (case-insensitively — no duplicate row is created) and creates any essential role that’s missing; re-running is a no-op.

Which roles lock, by trigger

Triggering module	Roles that lock	Why
First Loan matter (Loan management)	Borrower, Guarantor, Lender	A participant’s loan capacity is derived from their Matter Role name, so renaming or deleting one would prevent that person from being added to a loan.
First Estate matter (Estate interview)	Executor, Beneficiary, Witness, Estate Trustee, Administrator, Trustee, Successor Trustee, Attorney for Property, Attorney for Personal Care, Guardian, Settlor	The estate roles the module seeds and the questionnaire engine attaches participants by — renaming/deleting one would break those references.

Roles such as Buyer, Seller, Spouse / Partner, the litigation set (Plaintiff, Defendant, Applicant, Respondent, …), and Other never lock — they’re conveniences/jurisdiction roles you fully control.

Power of Attorney stays editable

Power of Attorney ships as a default role but is not locked by the estate module: the estate engine matches Attorney for Property and Attorney for Personal Care, never “Power of Attorney”. So it remains fully editable.

A reusable mechanism

“Lock the essential entries the moment a module starts relying on them, adopting what’s already there” is a shared primitive. Matter Roles are its first tenant; other managed lists can adopt the same behaviour as more modules ship.

Why the axes stay separate

The separation is deliberate and load-bearing:

• Staff Function is not a Matter Role. Putting “Matter Responsible” into the participant role picker would cross-wire staff into role notifications, Critical-Date recipients, and fee attribution. Staff Function is a fixed set under Assigned staff — see Accounting permissions.
• Access Level is not a Matter Role either. It governs what a staff member can do in the org (Owner / Admin / Manager / General), not how they relate to a single matter — see Access Levels.
• Authorized-rep role describes a person’s tie to an entity (a company’s Director/Officer/Shareholder), independent of any matter, and is a fixed system list orgs can’t edit.

Related pages

• Settings ▸ Managed Lists — where Matter Roles are edited (and where locked roles appear)
• Matter detail ▸ Participants tab — Involvement + Matter Role in use
• Settings ▸ Access Levels — the Access Level axis
• Settings ▸ Accounting permissions — Staff Function + fee attribution basis
• Loan management — loan capacities (Borrower / Guarantor / Lender)
• Estate interview — estate Matter Roles