"Who changed the hearing date?"
Every firm has had this conversation. A date is wrong, or a phone number, or a figure on a retainer. Somebody changed it. Nobody remembers doing it, and the file gives you no way to find out.
In BeornNotes you open the record, click History, and read what happened: the field that changed, what it was before, what it became, who did it, and when.
What gets recorded
Every change to an audited field is kept as its own entry — not a vague "record modified" stamp, but the specific change:
| When | Who | Field | From | To |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 Mar 2026 9:42 AM | Marcus Nguyen | Hearing Date | 3/18/2026 | 3/25/2026 |
| 14 Mar 2026 9:41 AM | Marcus Nguyen | Status | Pending | Filed |
Creating a record is recorded too, with the values it started with. So is deleting one.
The names stay right. The trail records who by identity, not by copying their name at the time — so when someone marries and changes their surname, the history reads correctly rather than preserving a name nobody recognises.
Every file has its own history
This is the part firms don't expect.
When someone attaches a document, that attachment gets its own audit trail: who uploaded it, when, under what description — and if the description is corrected later, that correction is recorded too. Open any single file and read its history on its own, without wading through everything that ever happened to the matter it belongs to.
Attachments can carry a description, written as the file is added and editable afterwards, because scan_0043.pdf tells nobody anything six months later. Correcting a description is itself part of the record.
You decide who can see it
Not every firm wants the audit trail in front of every user, so each account chooses its own audience:
- Nobody — the history buttons don't appear at all, for a cleaner screen
- Administrators only — the default
- Administrators and managers
- Everyone in the firm
The choice applies everywhere history is offered, and it's enforced on the server rather than merely hidden in the interface.
Changes are always recorded regardless of the setting. Choosing who may read the history never changes what is kept. Switch it on a year later and the full record is there waiting.
Two people, one record, no silent overwrites
An audit trail tells you what happened. It's better if the bad thing doesn't happen in the first place.
When someone opens a record to edit it, BeornNotes can lock it — anyone else opening the same record sees that it's in use and by whom, instead of both people typing over each other and the second save quietly winning. The lock releases itself if a browser is closed or a laptop goes to sleep, so nobody is ever left holding a file open that they've forgotten about.
Meanwhile the record list updates itself as colleagues change things, so you aren't looking at a screen that went stale twenty minutes ago.
Why this matters more in a law firm
Most businesses treat an audit trail as an accounting feature. For a legal practice it's closer to the core of the work: a file is a chronology, and the question "when did we learn this, and who recorded it?" can matter enormously later.
A shared drive and a spreadsheet can't answer it. Neither can most systems built for general small-business use, which record that something changed without recording what.
Look at it on real data. Start a free trial, import a few matters, change some things, and read the history back. It's the fastest way to see whether it tells you what you'd actually want to know.