Delegation and Cover
Delegation hands one person's work to another for a period. It is how leave, sickness and secondment are covered without reassigning every case individually and then reassigning them all back.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Automation:
- Delegations — who is covering for whom, and until when
- Worklist — the console where cover is visible in the in-tray
Delegate for a period, always
A delegation carries a start and an end. That matters far more than it appears: a delegation without an end is a permanent grant somebody set up for a fortnight two years ago and never removed. Nobody notices, because nothing about it looks wrong — right up until an audit asks why a former colleague's deputy still sees their caseload.
Set the end date when you set the start date, every time.
Delegation is not transfer
The original owner remains the owner. The delegation is visible as a delegation, so the record shows who acted and on whose behalf. That distinction survives into the audit trail, which is what you need when somebody asks who made a decision during a period of cover.
Where the intention is genuinely to hand a case over permanently, reallocate it instead. Using an open-ended delegation as a transfer produces a caseload nobody can report on accurately.
What gets delegated
Delegation covers the worklist — what appears in the deputy's in-tray. It does not silently grant access to records the deputy could not otherwise open: where a case is classified or restricted by record access, those controls still apply. That is deliberate, and it means cover for a colleague who handles sensitive work needs the access granting as well as the delegation setting up.
Expiry
The Worklist Housekeeping task expires delegations whose period has ended. Without it running, cover set up for a fortnight quietly persists indefinitely — the end date is recorded but nothing acts on it. Enable it hourly under Automation → Tasks.
Practical timing
Set the delegation up before the leave starts rather than on the final afternoon, and let it run a day past the return so anything arriving on the last morning is still covered. Both are small habits that remove a whole category of "it was in their in-tray while they were away" problems.
Worked example — a legal team over Christmas
Three fee earners are away across the holiday. Each delegates to the duty solicitor from 20 December to 5 January. The duty solicitor's in-tray shows their own matters plus the three delegated caseloads, marked as delegated. On 5 January the delegations expire by themselves. The two matters that were classified needed an explicit record-access grant as well, which was done at the same time and removed on return.
Recommendations
- Review active delegations monthly. The list should be short. Anything on it that surprises you is worth asking about.
- Delegate to a named person, not a team, where accountability matters — "the team was covering" is not an answer to a complaint.
- Check the deputy can actually open the work. A delegated in-tray full of records they cannot read is worse than no cover, because it looks handled.
- Do not delegate indefinitely to cover a vacancy. Reallocate; a vacancy is a resourcing fact and should be visible as one.