Settings ▸ Matters ▸ Ethical Wall
This page documents Settings ▸ Matters ▸ Ethical Wall in the Athenty admin portal — where you privatize matters and oversee the ones that are walled off. For an Owner/Admin it has three tabs: Divisions (turn the wall on/off per division), Approval Queue (approve or deny per-matter barrier requests), and Restricted Matters (the oversight list, with a per-matter Lift barrier action). A Compliance Management add-on user sees the Approval Queue and Restricted Matters tabs — they can approve, deny and lift Information Barriers just like an Owner/Admin — but not the Divisions tab. See The controls.
How matter privatization works
Section titled “How matter privatization works”Privatization has two layers, which combine:
- Ethical Wall (per division). An Owner/Admin toggle applied to an entire division. When enabled, that division’s matters are screened out of the org-wide matters list for staff who have no access path to them. This is the broad, division-level screen.
- Information Barrier (per matter). A full lock on a single matter. It is usually the Matter Responsible (or an Owner/Admin) who requests the barrier, and an Owner/Admin or a Compliance Manager must approve it before it takes effect. Once active, the matter is hidden from screened staff everywhere in the app — global search, the matters list, matter detail, and every picker (time entry, trust accounting, invoices, loans, envelopes), as well as the conflict-of-interest checker, the participant “Matters” tab, and the participant directory.
Restricted Matters
Section titled “Restricted Matters”Lists every matter with an active Information Barrier. Because a barrier fully hides a matter from screened staff, this central list ensures those restricted matters are still tracked and don’t get lost once hidden.
Suppressed conflicts
Section titled “Suppressed conflicts”When a screened staff member runs a conflict check that would have matched a restricted matter, the match is suppressed for that user — they never learn the matter exists, which is the purpose of an ethical wall. The same conflict is flagged here for compliance oversight (which entity collides, and which other matter they appear on), so the firm does not go blind to a real conflict behind the wall.
Who can see this — and what they can do
Section titled “Who can see this — and what they can do”| Role | Barrier approve / deny / lift | Division wall on/off toggle |
|---|---|---|
| Owner / Admin | ✅ approve, deny, lift | ✅ toggle the division wall |
| Compliance Management add-on | ✅ approve, deny, lift | ❌ no toggle |
| Manager / fee-earner not on the matter | ❌ no access | ❌ |
Staff assigned to a matter always keep full visibility of that matter elsewhere in the app (search, matter detail, and so on) — that is a separate surface from this Settings oversight page, which they cannot open.
The Compliance Management add-on can approve, deny and lift Information Barriers, exactly like an Owner/Admin — this keeps barrier approvals from bottlenecking on Owner/Admin. What a compliance user cannot do is toggle the division-level Ethical Wall on/off; that stays Owner/Admin only. This is enforced server-side: the approve/deny/lift endpoints and the Restricted-Matters oversight read accept Owner/Admin or the Compliance add-on, while the division-toggle endpoint requires the org-management permission, so a compliance user is returned a 403 there. Every approve/deny/lift records who performed it, for segregation-of-duties accountability. (Requesting a barrier is usually done by the matter’s Matter Responsible, who can also lift one from the matter’s own page.)
The controls
Section titled “The controls”Two configuration tabs sit alongside the Restricted Matters oversight on this page:
- Divisions (Owner/Admin only) — turns the per-division wall on or off with a toggle per division.
- Approval Queue (Owner/Admin or Compliance Manager) — the list of pending Information-Barrier requests raised by Matter Responsibles (or by an Owner/Admin), where an approver — an Owner/Admin or a Compliance Manager — approves or denies each one (with an optional note sent to the requester). Approval is what actually activates a barrier; a request on its own never takes effect, so a request can never wall off a matter unilaterally.
Lifting a barrier. On the Restricted Matters tab, an Owner/Admin or a Compliance Manager can Lift barrier on any active-barrier matter (a confirm step guards it), returning the matter to normal visibility. A barrier can also be lifted by the matter’s own Matter Responsible, from the matter’s own page. The Compliance add-on does not see the Divisions tab or the division toggle.
Sources & authorities
Section titled “Sources & authorities”- Model (pan-Canadian) — Federation of Law Societies of Canada, Model Code of Professional Conduct, s. 3.4 (Conflicts), rule 3.4-1, read with the r. 1.1-1 definition of “conflict of interest”. Given first because Athenty is not an Ontario-only product; the Ontario rule below is its local adoption.
- Rules of professional conduct for most regulated professionals, such as LSO Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 3.4 — Conflicts of Interest (Chapter 3, “Relationship to Clients”). Rule 3.4 covers the duty to avoid acting where there is a conflicting interest, and rules 3.4-17 to 3.4-23 set out the screening measures for a transferring licensee — the “ethical wall” this feature implements. See also the LSO’s practice guidance, Steps for dealing with conflicts of interest rules.
- Full LSO rules — Complete Rules of Professional Conduct.