Organizations

What are Caseflow organizations?

Organizations are how Caseflow groups members of various BVA (and beyond!) teams. Since members of the same team have similar responsibilities and levels of access, we are able to use organization membership as a form of access control. And since an appeal must visit multiple teams at the Board before being dispatched, we are able to use organizations to address members of those Board teams without the application code having to know explicitly who those individual members are. Organizing caseflow users into teams also allows similar tasks to be bulk assigned to individual users by admins of that organization.

How do I add somebody to an existing organization?

• Visit /organizations/{TEAM URL}/users (or click the "{TEAM NAME} team management" link the dropdown that appears after you click your CSS ID in the top-right of each page).
  • You must be an admin of the selected organization or have the "System Admin" Caseflow function granted in order to visit this page.
• Search for the person you would like to add to the team in the "Select user to add" dropdown bar and click their name.
  • The you would like to add to the team must have already logged in to Caseflow in order to be selectable in this list.
• Their name should appear as an item in the list of names below the "{TEAM NAME} team" heading.

How do I create a new Judge Team?

• Visit /team_management (or click the "Caseflow team management" link the dropdown that appears after you click your CSS ID in the top-right of each page).
  • You must be a member of the Bva organization in Caseflow in order to visit this page.
• Click the "+ Add Judge Team" button beside the "Judge teams" heading. A modal will appear.
• Search for the name of the judge you would like to create the judge team for, click on their name, and click "Submit".
• Their name should appear as a row at the bottom of the list of "Judge teams".

How do I create a specific Board team organization?

In order to create an organization that maps directly to a specific Board team and can be addressed in the application code by calling MyNewTeam.singleton, you will need to create a new class for that team in the models/organizations/ directory following the pattern laid out by other organizations there.

Existing Organizations

• AodTeam - Advance on Docket Team. Responsible for marking veterans as AOD. Strong overlap with litigation support.
• BoardProductOwners - Members of the board
• BusinessLine - e.g. National Cemetery, Education, Loan Guarantee.
• Bva - Catch-all organization for Board of Veteran Appeals. Used for Caseflow superadmins and support team - people who can visit the team organization page.
• BvaDispatch -
• BvaIntake - Team which oversees intake.
• CaseReview -
• CaseflowSupport - Members of the Caseflow Support team
• CavcLitigationSupport - For Litigation Support team members who only works on CAVC cases -- see #15278
• ClerkOfTheBoard - A team of a VLJ and attorneys who support the Intake team with intaking AMA appeals and handle complex workflows such as switching dockets or editing NOD dates.
• Colocated - now called "VLJ Support". Veteran Law Judge support staff.
• DvcTeam - Folks who are Deputy Vice Chairpersons
• FieldVso - VSO which does not write IHP.
• HearingAdmin -
• HearingsManagement - responsible for scheduling hearings
• JudgeTeam - Judge and attorneys.
• LitigationSupport - Responsible for all post-appeal decision motions (e.g. Motion To Vacate). Responsible for representing BVA before CAVC.
• MailTeam - Handles incoming mail.
• OaiTeam - Office of Assessment and Improvement
• OccTeam - Office of Chief Counsel
• PrivacyTeam - Handles FOIA requests. (Call themselves Privacy Act Team now)
• PrivateBar - Private attorneys representing veterans.
• PulacCerullo - PC is one type of very specific post-decisional motion. One person is usually designated to handle.
• QualityReview - QR on judge decisions.
• SpecialCaseMovementTeam - For extraordinary cases, requiring advancement on docket.
• TranscriptionTeam - Transcription of hearings.
• Translation - Translating documents into English.
• VhaCamo - Members of the Vha's Capital Asset Management Office
• VhaProgramOffice - Consists of six Vha Program Offices which sit below VhaCamo in the pre-docketing workflow
• VhaRegionalOffice - Consists of eighteen Vha Regional Offices (also known as VISNs) which sit below the VhaProgramOffice in the pre-docketing workflow (these organizations are currently not being utilized in production due to user access issues)
• Vso - National Veteran Service Org. IHP-writing VSO.
• SpecialtyCaseTeam - The Specialty Case Team (SCT) is an organization of specially selected attorneys which serve as subject matter experts in one or more rare or complex legal areas within Veterans law. Currently appeals with VHA issues are sent to this organization's queue after distribution. The appeals are then assigned to SCT attorneys to be reviewed.

(list created with Organization.all.pluck(:type).uniq.sort)

Auto-assign Organizations

Some organizations automatically_assign_to_member, i.e., tasks that are assigned to the organization are automatically assigned to one of the organization's members. Such organizations override the next_assignee method, for example:

• BvaDispatch - app/models/organizations/bva_dispatch.rb
• Colocated (VLJ Support) - app/models/organizations/colocated.rb
• PulacCerullo - app/models/organizations/pulac_cerullo.rb

See Automatic Task Distribution for details

System Admin CSUM Abilities

Users with a CSUM role of System Admin can access /team_management by clicking "Caseflow Team Management" in the user dropdown and add admins to any organization. See Organization Management for more details.