A contact is a representation of either an individual (natural person) or an entity (company, sole trader, court, etc) in ContactsLaw.

Whenever you need to draw upon information relating to a person or business; for example, when creating a matter or requesting a payment, you create a link back to the contact. Changes made on the contact will propagate through to all linked items automatically. This allows for maximum re-use of information.

Contacts are created within a particular subscription and are shared across all businesses.

Contact Types

At minimum, every contact is either an individual or an entity. You can add additional contact types to imbue special behaviour:

Individuals

Judicial Officer - A judge, magistrate or other judicial officer that can be assigned role(s) on a matter.
Lawyer - A practising lawyer that can be assigned as the representative of a party on a matter.

Entities

Bank - A financial institution in which accounts may be held.
Court - A judicial body which determines the jurisdiction of a matter.
Law Firm - A law firm, practice or other entity that can be assigned as the representative of a party on a matter.
Trust - A trust or estate.

Properties

A contact may have the following properties:

Name(s), including historical names (e.g. maiden name, former business names, etc)
Gender
Date of birth/death
Occupation/industry group
Referral events
Communication entries (telephone, email address, etc)
Addresses and correspondence preferences
Notes
Related contacts, including details about the nature of each relationship
Financial details (bank details, etc)
Tags

Roles

Role is a term used throughout ContactsLaw to refer to the way in which contacts are utilised. For example, a contact may appear as the author of a document, or as the plaintiff on a litigation file.

Generally, roles have unique names and are shared across various parts of the system. A role may be defined at global scope, or may be limited to one or more workgroup(s).

User-created content such as files or documents may subscribe to a set of roles. In this way, contacts can not only be associated with these records, but the nature of the association can also be recorded.

Roles play a significant part in document building. Since contacts are assigned roles, document templates can contain fields which point to particular roles. When a document is built from the template, the contacts belonging to these roles feed the information inserted into those fields. (For example, defining an 'executor' role in the 'wills' workgroup makes it possible to create documents where the executor contact's names, addresses and telephone numbers are automatically filled-in.)

Controlled roles

If defined, certain roles will be treated specially by ContactsLaw. These are termed controlled roles. The following types of controlled roles can be created:

For documents
- From - E-mails, faxes and other forms of correspondence will identify this role as the author/sender. When you create a letter, fax or e-mail, ContactsLaw will populate this role with the member's contact.
- To - E-mails, faxes and other forms of correspondence will identify this role as the addressee/recipient. When you register e-mails or faxes, ContactsLaw will look up contacts that match the recipient's e-mail address or fax number. When you create a letter, fax or e-mail, ContactsLaw will populate this role with the contact supplied to the activity.
- CC - As above, using the carbon copy receipients from an e-mail. You can add carbon copy contacts to a file's distribution list.
- BCC - As above, using the blind carbon copy recipients from an e-mail. Applies to outgoing e-mails only.
For workgroups
- Document manager - Models an additional member on a file who is responsible for the daily management of documents relating to the matter. You can delegate tasks and filter a number of reports according to the document manager. In the absence of a document manager, the file manager will be used.
- Responsible partner - Models an additional member on a file who is ultimately responsible for the matter. This may differ from the file supervisor in situations where the supervisor is not a partner/director of the firm. You can delegate tasks and filter a number of reports according to the responsible partner. In the absence of a responsible partner, the file supervisor will be used.

Availability of roles

The availability of a particular role depends on a range of factors:

	Workgroup	Global
File	✓ Roles from the file's workgroup only.	✗
Document type	✓ If the document type's workgroup contains the role.	✓
Document template	✓ If the template's workgroup contains the role.	✗

When you rename or merge roles, ContactsLaw will automatically update any references to the role in document types, templates, workgroups and files.