Outlaw Practice controls access with two separate ideas, and keeping them apart makes everything else make sense. Your account level (Owner, Administrator, or regular user) is about managing the firm: who can change settings, manage people, and touch financial history. Your roles (job descriptions like Attorney, Bookkeeper, or Salesperson, assigned on the Users page) are about what’s relevant to you: which reports, dashboard widgets, and work areas you see. A user can hold any number of roles.

The app marks each level with its own icon and color, everywhere users appear:

Owner

Outranks everyone. The owner-only actions are the ones that touch money, history, or the firm’s identity: granting or revoking the Owner level, signing up for Outlaw Payments and re-linking the firm’s bank accounts, the firm’s own subscription and billing, unfinalizing an invoice that has already been sent, changing a case’s fee arrangements after invoicing has begun, and directly editing a transaction that’s already on an invoice. Owners also receive the warning tasks when a re-run conflict check surfaces new conflicts.

Administrator

Runs the firm day to day: every page in Settings requires an administrator, as does managing users (except anything involving owners), deleting cases, leads, and campaigns, editing someone else’s task timer, correcting a completed payment transaction, and editing or deleting other people’s private comments. Administrators can also search Settings pages from the search bar and view session replays.

User

Everyone else works normally (tasks, cases, contacts, time, documents), with their visibility shaped by roles. You can never change your own account level: promotions, demotions, and suspensions are always done by someone else.

Outlaw seeds these roles for every firm: Owner, Administrator, Attorney, Paralegal, Legal Secretary, Bookkeeper, Office Manager, Marketing Manager, Salesperson, Receptionist, and Human Resources.

Three of them (Attorney, Paralegal, and Legal Secretary) are the legal roles, and they carry workflow weight: when a conflict check is saved, every user holding a legal role receives a sign-off task. Attorneys and paralegals are also who the case page offers when assigning legal staff.

Two other roles have special behavior:

* Appears when Outlaw Payments is active. The navigation link only shows for the roles with access, so nobody sees a menu item they can’t open.

† A finalized invoice can never be deleted, by anyone. You must first un-finalize the invoice.

Conflict checks are workflow rather than access: every user holding a legal role signs off on each check, and owners receive warning tasks when a re-run surfaces new conflicts.

Two rules combine for reports.

Scope. Owners, administrators, and bookkeepers see firm-wide data. Everyone else who can open a report sees their own data only. An attorney opening Utilization sees their own utilization, not the firm’s.

Access. Owners and administrators can open every report. For the other roles, access goes report by report, and the Reports menu only shows what you can open:

The three legal roles (Attorney, Paralegal, and Legal Secretary) share the same report access, which keeps the conflict-check team and the reporting audience aligned.

The dashboard shows each person the cards and feeds for their roles. Owners and administrators see every widget, and a user with no roles sees all of it:

Your clients are not firm users. The portal is a separate, far more limited view: portal visitors see only their own cases, documents that haven’t been excluded from the case file, and payment surfaces. They never see private comments, red flags, conflict checks, or anything marked internal. See Private Comments and Notes & Attachments for the client-file rules.