What Is a Case, Anyway? The Mental Model Behind Herarx

Every piece of software is built around one idea, whether or not it says so. Spreadsheets are built around the cell. Email is built around the message. Shared drives are built around the folder. Herarx is built around the case.

A case is one record for one matter. A tenancy. An investigation. A grievance. A research study. A client file. It does not matter what your profession calls it — the shape is the same: a thing with a beginning, a lifespan, people attached to it, documents that accumulate, dates that matter, and an end.

Why not folders?

Folders hold files. They do not hold facts. A folder cannot tell you the deadline, who the other side's solicitor is, what the last phone call was about, or whether the deposit has been returned. All of that lives in your head, in an email thread, or in a spreadsheet three tabs deep — and the moment someone else needs to pick up the work, it is gone.

A case holds the facts and the files. Core fields — title, status, importance, start date, due date, result — plus whatever your template adds: custom fields, tables, contact roles, tasks, generated documents. The files are attached to the case, not the other way round.

One case, one boundary

The second half of the idea is just as important: a case holds nothing about any other matter. Access is granted per case. Sharing is per case. Encryption, when you turn it on, is per case. When two clients' documents can never sit in the same container, cross-contamination stops being a discipline you have to maintain and becomes a property of the system.

What a case contains

• Fields — the facts, typed: text, numbers, dates, choices, money, contacts.
• Tables — repeating rows: rent periods, evidence items, interview notes, invoices.
• Contacts — the people and companies involved, each in a named role.
• Files — uploads, filed emails, generated PDFs, signed documents.
• Tasks and dates — what has to happen and by when, feeding the calendar.
• Timeline — who did what, when, in order.

Where the shape comes from

A case takes its shape from a template. The template decides which tabs, fields, tables and roles exist, which documents can be generated, and which rules fire automatically. Change the template and every case built from it gains the new field. That is the subject of our next post.

If you take one thing from this: stop thinking about where a file goes and start thinking about which case it belongs to. Everything else in Herarx follows from that.