Topic
- Security & Compliance
Featured Apps
Table of Contents
The problem
Legal teams manage some of the most sensitive information in an organization: settlement amounts, privileged counsel notes, litigation risk classifications, penalty clauses, and contract terms that carry real commercial and legal exposure if seen by the wrong people.
The challenge is that legal work rarely happens in isolation. Contract approvals involve finance. Vendor disputes involve procurement. Regulatory filings involve compliance. All of these stakeholders have legitimate reasons to be in the same Jira issue, and under Jira’s native permission model, every one of them can see every field on it.
There is no native way to restrict a settlement amount field to legal roles while keeping the case timeline visible to project managers. Jira’s permissions control access to the issue as a whole, not to individual fields within it.
The typical response is a separate restricted legal project for sensitive matters. It protects privileged data, but it creates a record management problem. Two projects for the same case means two places to track progress, two sets of automation rules, and a persistent question about which project holds the authoritative version of the matter.
How Secure Custom Fields for Jira addresses this
Secure Custom Fields for Jira adds field-level view and edit permissions to Jira custom fields. Each field carries its own access rules (configured by user, group, or role) independent of the project and issue permissions already in place.
A case issue can contain both general workflow fields (matter status, assigned counsel, next hearing date, stakeholder tasks) and restricted fields (settlement amount, litigation risk rating, privileged notes, penalty clause details) within a single issue. Each collaborator sees only the fields their role authorizes.
A project manager tracking the case timeline sees workflow fields. The settlement amount and privileged notes are present on the issue but the values are withheld — displaying “You don’t have permission to view the value” — until the user has the appropriate field-level permission. Legal roles configured with access see the full picture. If a masked display is preferable to a permission message, admins can configure that alternative.
View and edit permissions are separate controls. A finance stakeholder can be given read access to the approved settlement figure without being able to modify it. Only the designated legal lead can update privileged notes. That access asymmetry is enforced at the field level without requiring separate issues or manual access management.
What this means in practice
One Jira project handles the complete matter workflow. Privileged and commercially sensitive fields are restricted to legal roles. General workflow fields remain visible to the cross-functional collaborators who need them. Case context stays intact. The record is authoritative.
Field-level audit logs record who accessed or modified each sensitive field throughout the matter lifecycle. When an internal review, external audit, or legal hold requires documentation of who had access to privileged information, the log provides a specific, timestamped answer — not an inference from project membership.
The compliance dimension
For organizations subject to GDPR, legally privileged information and personal data in case files is subject to data minimization requirements: accessible only to those with a legitimate need. Field-level permissions implement that access control directly within Jira, at the level of individual fields rather than at the project boundary.
Combined with audit-ready field logs, Secure Custom Fields for Jira supports the access governance and evidence requirements that legal, compliance, and data protection teams need; without those controls requiring workflows to move outside Jira.
Secure Custom Fields for Jira adds field-level view and edit permissions, configurable data masking, AES-256 encryption, and audit-ready logs to Jira Cloud. Built on Atlassian Forge. Your data stays within Jira Cloud infrastructure.