Law Firm Management — Confidential Matters, Time Spent and Fees (Odoo Community)

Law Firm Management — DYONYSOS

The fees extension of the free edition dyo_avocats_lite, for Odoo 19 Community. Matters, their confidentiality, time spent and procedural deadlines come from the free module; this one adds the fee agreement, the fee note, invoicing and profitability indicators per matter.

Also searched as: law firm management software Odoo, lawyer time tracking, lawyer fee invoicing, fee agreement under the Macron law, procedural deadline schedule. English version: law firm practice management for Odoo Community — matter files, time tracking, fee agreements and procedural deadlines.

The real problem. Small law firms track time spent and bill on a flat-fee or hourly basis using disconnected office tools (calendar, fee spreadsheet, word processor for the fee agreement), with no consolidated view of profitability per case and no reliable tracking of procedural deadlines.

Client matters. Matter record linked to a client (mixin dyo.metiers.beneficiary.mixin from the dyo_metiers_common base module), with a lead attorney, a type of litigation and a sequential matter reference.

Strict confidentiality per matter — the cornerstone of this module. Attorney professional secrecy (article 66-5 of loi n°71-1130 of December 31, 1971) is absolute and covers the entire matter. A firm member can only see, search or modify matters for which they are the lead attorney or to which they have been explicitly added as an authorized associate — not a menu restriction, but a record rule (ir.rule) applied to the matter and everything attached to it (time spent, fee agreement, deadlines, fee notes), verified by automated tests run with a real, non-superuser user account.

Fee agreement. Flat fee or hourly rate, with its signature date. The law of August 6, 2015 (known as the loi Macron) makes a written fee agreement mandatory: this module prevents a fee note from being confirmed as long as no agreement has been signed on the matter.

Time spent. Each task (drafting, consultation, hearing, research, correspondence...) is logged with its duration and valued automatically at the hourly rate of the fee agreement in force.

Procedural deadlines. Hearing, filing of submissions, limitation period... with an alert that triggers automatically as the deadline approaches (activity scheduled for the lead lawyer) and a synchronized calendar event (calendar.event).

Fee notes. Generated as a flat fee or from valued time spent, then invoiced (account.move) through standard Accounting mechanisms — this module does not reimplement invoicing. The profitability of each matter (fees invoiced versus valued time) is consolidated on the matter record.

Important — what the application does not do (see the dedicated section of this listing and the README): no CARPA accounting (handling of client funds, escrow), which falls under a separate, dedicated and mandatory system — this module never offers to collect such funds; no drafting of legal instruments or pleading templates; the deadline reminder is a management tool, not a legal guarantee that the deadline will be met; no interconnection with the RPVA or the courts.

Demo data: three different litigation files, two associate lawyers with separate assignments (to observe access partitioning), fee agreements on a flat-fee and hourly basis, valued time spent, an upcoming procedural deadline triggering an alert, and an invoiced fee note.