Contact management

Contacts form the foundation for clients in Legalsense, but a contact can also serve other roles, such as debtor, contact person, or counterparty. This article explains how to add a new contact, describes the available fields, and covers how to find, edit, and manage a contact once it exists.

Add a contact

Go to Matters → Contacts and click New contact to open the form for entering the contact's information, billing details, and other contact details.

New contact form, showing the fields for entering a new contact.

Contact information

Select Organization to add a company as the contact, or Natural person if the contact is an individual. The two options have different fields to complete.

New contact form, showing the contact information fields for an organization.

Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are mandatory. Fill in as much contact information as possible: this helps during a conflict check and when consulting debtor information later. Beyond the standard fields, you can ask Legalsense support to mark additional fields as mandatory for your environment.

Legalsense records your choice of Organization or Natural person as the contact's kind. You'll see this wherever contacts are listed or searched, for example as a column in Contact search, and it's one of the fields a conflict check matches against.

Note: If your environment has the company information integration enabled, you can search for an organization by name or registration number and let Legalsense fill in these fields automatically. See the article ↪ Looking up company information.

Billing address

Use the Address template field to determine how the contact appears on invoices, for example with or without "Attn." before the contact's name.

Address template field on the new contact form, showing the dropdown of available templates.

Fill in the remaining address fields to complete the billing address. You can add further addresses to the contact later; see Edit a contact below.

Debtor and billing details

This section determines whether the contact is billed directly, and how.

• Debtor: check this if invoices can be addressed to this contact, for example because it's a client, or because it pays on behalf of one. A contact created as a client is always a debtor. Once you save a contact as a debtor, Legalsense assigns it a Debtor number automatically.
• Account manager: the fee earner responsible for the relationship with this contact. You can search and filter by this field later; see the article ↪ Contact search.
• VAT number and Applicable VAT: for a debtor, record its VAT number and choose how VAT applies to it: Default, Intra-community (EU), or Outside of the EU. Legalsense uses this setting to calculate and label VAT correctly on invoices addressed to this contact. See the article ↪ VAT rates for guidance on which option applies.
• Notes: free-text background on the contact, for your own or your colleagues' reference. Keep in mind that an excerpt of these notes can appear in a conflict check's PDF export, so avoid recording anything you wouldn't want to surface there.
• Tags: freeform labels you can add to a contact to group or filter it for your own purposes. Tags also appear in a conflict check's PDF export.

If the contact has a debtor role, also fill in the Email and Secondary email fields when invoices and reminders should be sent electronically:

• Enter the email address of the organization, department, or person who should receive the invoice, and check Billing to.
• If the contact should also receive payment reminders, check Dunning to.
• For additional invoice recipients, enter their email address in Secondary email and check Billing CC.

Edit a contact

To edit a contact, first select it: go to Matters → Contacts and click the contact you want to open. For more information about finding a specific contact, see the article ↪ Contact search.

The contact overview shows all information about the selected contact.

Contact overview page, showing the edit contact button.

Click Edit at the top right of the contact page to open the same form used when adding a new contact (see Add a contact above), where you can edit the contact's data.

To add a second or new address, click New address. Use the icons in the top-right corner of an address to edit it, stop using it as the default address, or delete it.

The Addresses section of the contact overview page.

You can also add a new contact linked to this contact, or link an existing one to it, under Contact persons on the right side of the page.

If the contact has the role debtor, which is always the case for clients, the contact overview also shows which active and archived matters it's linked to.

Contact person

If the contact is an organization, use the Contact persons section to link one or more individual contacts to it. You can link an existing contact already in Legalsense, or click New contact to create and link a new one directly from this screen.

Contact persons section on a contact's page, with the options to link an existing contact person or add a new contact.

Find a contact

Once a contact exists, go to Matters → Contacts to browse the contact list, or click More filters to filter by role, VAT details, location, and more. See the article ↪ Contact search for the full list of filters.

What you can do with a contact

Once a contact exists, Legalsense uses it in several other places:

• Conflict check: a contact's name, kind (Organization or Natural person), and related matters are part of what a conflict check searches, and its registration, VAT, or ID number, account manager, notes, and tags all appear in the exported PDF. See the article ↪ Conflict check.
• KYC and compliance documents: you can attach documents such as identification or signed terms directly to a contact, alongside its client or matter. See the article ↪ KYC and compliance.
• Invoicing: a contact with the debtor role can be selected as the party an invoice is billed to, using the billing and VAT details recorded on it.
• Matters: a contact can be linked to one or more matters in a role such as counterparty or other related contact, which is also what makes it show up in a conflict check on that matter.

Additional options

To archive

Click To archive to archive the contact or contact person. Archiving removes the contact from the list of active contacts and places it on the archived contacts list. You can only archive a contact if it isn't linked to an active matter and has no unpaid invoices linked to it.

Delete

Click Delete to delete the contact. You can only delete a contact if it doesn’t have any invoices connected to it, whether paid or unpaid. Also the contact cannot be in use by an active client, or be attached to an active matter, or linked to an active person or organization.

Note: You can also archive or delete a contact directly from the contact list. Click the box icon to archive it or the bin icon to delete it.