Contact

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 to the relevant contact. This process reduces the need for duplicate data entry.

Contacts are created within a particular subscription and are shared across all businesses within that subscription. This allows all users within the subscription to benefit from the shared pool of contacts.

Types

At minimum, every contact is either an individual or an entity. You can designate further types for special behaviours:

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.

Note: Entities can also be used to describe abstract contacts, such as "persons unknown".

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 entries (bank details, etc)
• Tags

Names

Individuals

The components of an individual's name are stored separately, so that they can be formatted in different ways; e.g. for casual or formal greetings:

• Title
• First name
• Middle name(s) separated by spaces
• Last name

At minimum, you must specify either a first name or a last name for all individual contacts.

In many cases, an individual's first name can be used to predict their gender. You can improve the accuracy of these predictions by creating more individual contacts.

You can add historical records of former names, such as an individual's maiden name, which will be used during the period in which they are in effect. You can also mark such entries as aliases, in which case they will appear separately and can be in effect indefinitely.

Entities

Entity contacts are often known by many names. You can specify the following:

• Trading name - The name under which a business trades, or is most commonly known. You must provide the trading name for all entity contacts.
• Registered name - If different to the above, the registered entity name; i.e. as it appears in government registers or for legal purposes.
• Abbreviation - Used only in situations where brevity is important, such as when building descriptions for documents and time records.
• Other name(s)

Although not considered part of an entity's name, the Australian Business Number (ABN) and/or Australian Company Number (ACN) can also be used to identify an entity contact. Historical records of these numbers can also be stored.