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
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 documents in ContactsLaw. You then create a brief based on the existing document, scanning 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, to be inserted into the existing document. Finalising the brief will not create a separate document.