Multi-entity
A firm with more than one office can be set up two ways, and the right answer depends on whether the offices need to see each other's work.
The choosing criterion
Start from the data, not the org chart. If the offices are genuinely separate legal entities, keep separate client books, or hold data that must never cross — different jurisdictions with different regulatory duties, for instance — use a separate workspace for each. If they are branches of one firm that need firm-wide visibility and a single bill, use one account with per-office configuration.
The two supported setups
| Setup | Use it when | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| A workspace per entity | Separate legal entities, separate client books, or data that must not cross a jurisdictional boundary. | Complete isolation. Each workspace carries its own matters, documents, team, plan, seats and billing, and nothing is visible from the other side. |
| One firm account, configured per office | Branches of a single firm that need firm-wide reporting and one subscription. | Multi-office, multi-jurisdiction and multi-currency support inside one account, with per-office configuration and firm-wide visibility. |
Running several workspaces
Switching is a single action: no sign-out, no reconfiguration. You move from one office to another and the whole dataset moves with you. In eFirm the switch is Change Workspace at the top left; a firm with several offices or entities lives in that control.
What travels with the workspace, and therefore changes when you switch:
- Matters, documents, contacts, financial records and timesheets.
- The team and their roles.
- The plan tier, the seat count and the credit balance.
- Firm settings: legal name, currency, tax rate and timezone.
The isolation is the point, not a side effect — data architecture covers what that guarantees and where the boundary sits.
Running one account across offices
Inside a single workspace, separation is done with roles rather than with boundaries. Record scope decides which records a role reaches, and it is set per module, so an office lead can be firm-wide on the calendar and limited to their own matters everywhere else. Setup Roles & Permissions is where that is configured, and settings and customizations covers the firm-wide values every office inherits.
Roles are not a data boundary. Record scope controls what a person sees. It does not put the data in a different environment. If a regulator, a client engagement letter or a conflicts wall requires that two books of business genuinely cannot touch, that is the case for separate workspaces.
Also common
- Consultants who serve several clients and keep one workspace per client.
- Firms that maintain a separate demo or training workspace alongside the live one.
There is no group-level console
A group running several entity workspaces manages each one separately. Billing, seats, members and reporting are all scoped to a single workspace at a time: the switcher moves you between them, but it never shows two at once, and there is no view that spans them. On mobile the rule is the same — everything workspace-scoped, from chat history and data rooms to credits and the plan, follows whichever workspace is active.
Budget for it when you choose. Six entity workspaces means six subscriptions to renew, six seat counts to keep in line with headcount and six sets of reports to read side by side. That is the price of the hard boundary, and it is the other half of the trade-off above.