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 numbers/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 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. (You may keep the document checked out, however.)
To manually copy and paste the fragment, use the Copy Fragment command. You may need to adjust formatting afterwards.
Page Numbers
When page numbers are required (such as when building a table of contents or index), they are determined using the following logic:
- The first document starts on the starting page number of the brief (typically the number of pages in the covering document plus one).
- If the page count is known, this determines the end page number for the document; otherwise, it is assumed to be a single page only.
- The remaining documents are numbered in order.
Documents Without Page Counts
Page counts are usually updated whenever a document is uploaded or checked in; however, some file formats (e.g. emails) are not laid out across pages, and therefore do not have page counts. When including such documents in a brief, you have two options:
- Convert¹ the document to a file format that is laid out across pages (e.g. PDF); or
- Enter the page count manually (into the document properties).
¹ Note that this does not replace the original content; the converted content is stored separately.
ContactsLaw includes functionality to convert all of the documents in a brief at once.
Creating a Bundle
Once a brief has been finalised, you can create a bundle by combining all of the documents into a single file, optionally adding labels and/or page numbers. This leverages document transformations.
This functionality depends on the file formats used.