Getting started
Learn how Matters, Voice, Clara, Reviews, Pillars, and your Workspace fit together.
Ardela organises legal work around a Matter. Capture, drafting, review, and firm-controlled approval all sit on that file, with private drafts until you choose to share them.
What you'll need
- An Ardela account (sign up or accept a workspace invitation)
- A modern browser for the web Workspace
- A built-in, headset, or USB microphone if you plan to record
- Optional: Ardela Mobile for native iOS or Android capture
- Optional: Ardela Voice for desktop on Windows or macOS
How Ardela is organised
The sidebar follows the same order as the product:
| Product or area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Clara | Searches context and proposes drafts, rewrites, summaries, and redlines for approval |
| Recordings | Your personal Voice collection for dictation, meetings, and uploads |
| Pillars | Extracts structured Tables from document packs and cites answers back to source |
| Reviews | Checks a document against a playbook and keeps findings with the source |
| Matters | The shared legal file for a client instruction, including people, files, and work |
| Workspace | Contains the firm's members, permissions, templates, and settings |
The navigation you see depends on your role, permissions, plan, and device. See Billing and plans for current entitlements.
Recommended path
- Set up your Workspace for members, templates, and controlled access.
- Open your first matter and add the first piece of work.
- Record a note using the browser workflow, or use Ardela Mobile or Ardela Voice for desktop.
- Use Clara, Reviews, and Pillars when you need drafting, playbook review, or cited document analysis.
Roles
Ardela provides five built-in role tiers:
- Owner has overall Workspace control, including billing and security.
- Admin manages members, settings, and day-to-day Workspace administration.
- Member is the usual fee-earner role for creating and managing legal work.
- Read-only can view existing work they can access, but cannot create or change it.
- Transcriber works from the Queue on items assigned or available to them. Transcribers are not part of the Legal team.
Custom roles can provide a more specific permission set on the Member tier. A role does not by itself make every matter visible: access also depends on ownership and Matter grants. See Permissions.
Transcripts, generated documents, extracted fields, and Clara proposals must be checked by the responsible legal professional before they are used or placed on a matter file. Sharing work with a Matter does not approve its contents.