Brief

A brief is a list of documents associated with a particular matter. Briefs are typically used to generate an index that lists those documents.

They can help by:

• Organising documents in a structured manner
• Assigning references to documents for easy identification
• Creating indexes or tables of contents for legal documents

Properties

Briefs have the following properties:

• Description
• Method by which the documents are labelled
• Numbering scheme (if documents are labelled by reference)
• Order in which the documents are sorted
• Starting page number
• Template used to generate the list of documents

Documents within a brief have the following additional properties:

• Reference number/code (specific to the brief)
• Page range

Adding Documents

The information in this section relates to a pre-release version of ContactsLaw and is not representative of the final product.

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches for adding documents to a brief:

Top-Down

With the top-down approach, you add documents from the matter (or other sources), finalise the brief and generate a list of documents using a particular template. The resulting list can be opened for further editing; however, the brief will not update to reflect documents you add/remove during editing.

Bottom-Up

With the bottom-up approach, you start by creating a document that contains links to other documents in ContactsLaw. You then create a brief based on the existing (source) document, which scans the body of the document for the links you added in the previous step. Fragments containing the list of documents can be generated on-demand; these can be inserted into the existing document or used elsewhere as needed. Finalising the brief will not create a separate document.

To automatically update an existing document and insert/replace the fragment, simply place a content marker for an insertion point at the desired position in the document, e.g. {Index} (name does not matter). Use the Insert Fragment command to start the update. Note that the document must not be open for editing (e.g. in Microsoft Word) as this will cause the update to fail.

To manually copy and paste the fragment, use the Copy Fragment command. You may need to adjust formatting afterwards.