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Finding and reusing experience

When a pitch asks "have you done this before?", the answer is somewhere in the firm — in a partner's memory, an old proposal, or a matter nobody thought to write up. Experience is where the firm captures that answer once so it can be reused, rather than reconstructed under deadline.

This page covers finding existing experience, reading an Experience record, and understanding the approval path a record travels before it can be used externally.

Everything here is Core. No Modules licence is required.

1. What an Experience record is

An Experience is a described piece of work the firm has done, written for reuse. It is not the same thing as a Matter:

Matter Experience
What it is The engagement the firm performed The story of that work, written for external use
Audience Internal — billing, staffing, conflicts External — pitches, directories, league tables
Who maintains it Finance and practice management BD, marketing, and the attorneys who did the work

An Experience usually points at the Matter it came from, but it does not have to. Work the firm wants to describe that predates the current system, or that spans several matters, can stand alone.

2. Find existing experience first

Before writing anything new, check whether the work is already described. Open the Experience tab in the CV Experience app, or search the client or deal name directly.

Two fields do most of the filtering work:

  • Status — whether the description is finished and usable
  • Primary Practice — the practice that owns the work

Always check Status before reusing a description. A record in Drafting has not been through review; putting it in front of a client is how unapproved language reaches an audience it was never cleared for.

3. The approval path

Experience records move through three stages:

Drafting → Under Review → Approved

Stage Means
Drafting Being written. Incomplete, unreviewed, not for external use
Under Review Written and submitted. Someone is checking accuracy and confidentiality
Approved Cleared for reuse in pitches, proposals, and directory submissions

Many records have no status at all. In a typical dataset a large share of Experience records sit outside the path entirely because Status was never set — often the result of an import. A blank Status is not the same as Approved. Treat it as unreviewed.

4. Reading an Experience record

The highlights panel

Name · Record Type · Status · Client · Primary Practice · Matter — visible from every tab.

The tabs

Tab Contents
Overview Three field sections: Overview, Deal Details, Case Details
Parties Experience Parties — the other participants in the work
Narratives Experience Narratives — the written descriptions
Experience Holders The firm's people who can speak to this work
Included Pitches Pitch Elements — where this experience has already been used

The sidebar

An accordion with four sections: Tags, Client Details, Matter Details, and Collaborators.

Collaborators is worth knowing about. It shows who has been given access to this record beyond normal sharing — relevant if a piece of work is sensitive. See Collaborators & Walls.

5. Deal work vs case work

The Details tab carries two different vocabularies:

Deal Details — for transactional work: Deal Type, Deal Value, Date Announced, First Closing, Date Closed, Offering Date, Target Fund Size, Proceeds Amount, Outcome, and the league-table fields (League Table Submission Reported Date, League Table Credit Granted).

Case Details — for contentious work: Case, Case Number, Case Type, Judge, Venue.

Case Type is a multi-select covering Mergers & Acquisitions, Securities Class Action, Patent Infringement, Trademark, Antitrust Investigation, SEC Enforcement, Tax Controversy, Employment Discrimination, Contract Dispute, Intellectual Property, Bankruptcy, and Regulatory Compliance.

Both sections appear on every Experience record, whatever the work. Four record types ship and are active — Corporate, Intellectual Property, Litigation, Regulatory — but the packaged Lightning page is the same for all of them, so a Litigation record still shows the full set of Deal fields. Fill in the section that matches the work and leave the other blank.

Separating them is a Lightning page assignment an admin makes per record type — see the Admin Guide. Record types may also not be selectable by you even though records carry them; that is a record-type assignment on your permission sets.

Deal Value Confidential

A checkbox, and it matters. Deal value is frequently the most sensitive number on the record and the one most likely to be copied into a pitch by someone who did not negotiate the engagement terms. Check it when the client has not agreed the value may be disclosed, and check whether it is ticked before quoting a figure externally.

6. Who can speak to the work

Experience Holders are the firm's people associated with a piece of experience. This is the difference between "the firm did this" and "here is the partner who can talk about it on a call".

When you are assembling a pitch team, Experience Holders tell you who actually has the detail — which is often not the billing attorney.

7. Narratives

Experience Narratives hold the written description. Keeping narratives as separate child records rather than one long text field on the Experience means the same piece of work can carry several descriptions — a two-line version for a capability statement, a paragraph for a pitch, a longer form for a directory submission — without anyone rewriting from scratch or trimming a submission down under time pressure.

Pick the narrative that fits the length you need rather than editing the record.

Known gaps in this release

Worth knowing before you plan work around these:

  • Deal Type, Deal Status, and Approval Level have unconfigured picklists. Each defines exactly one option, literally named Value 1. Existing records display real values — Deal Type shows M&A, Advisory, Litigation, Patent and more — because they were loaded through the API rather than chosen from the list. The effect is genuinely confusing: open the edit dropdown and you are offered only Value 1 and whatever the record already says. Every other value is unreachable. Until an administrator defines the real value set, do not edit these fields — saving will either blank the field or swap a meaningful value for a placeholder.
  • Narratives and Included Pitches may be empty even on well-populated records. Narrative capture and the Pitch Builder link are newer than the Experience records themselves in most datasets.

Troubleshooting

"I cannot see a status path across the top." The page includes a path component, but Salesforce renders it only once Path has been configured for the object in Setup. Until an admin does that, Status is an ordinary field on the Overview tab. A blank Status is also common after an import.

"I can see the Experience but not the Matter details." The sidebar's Matter Details section reads through the Matter lookup. If the Experience has no Matter linked, the section is empty — that is expected for standalone experience.

"Deal Type only offers one meaningless option." That is the placeholder noted above, not a permissions problem. Ask your admin to configure it.

"I need experience that isn't written up anywhere." Start from Matters and create the Experience from the work. The gap between "the firm did it" and "the firm can describe it" is exactly what this object exists to close.