Earlier this year, we introduced Interview and a whole new way to collect and analyze core, substantive information about your clients in order to make the best decisions. Today, we introduce a new Copy/Merge feature for parties in LawLab 5.1.

With Copy, information can be copied from one party to another. With Merge, two parties are merged into a single party.

To start Copy or Merge, click on the Copy/Merge icon  in the Record Caption. (The icon appears only when there are two or more parties associated with the record).

Keep in mind that there is no undo for Copy/Merge. Copy permanently overwrites data. Merge permanently deletes source party information.

Merging Parties

  • From the Record View, click on the   icon on the top right corner:

  • In the Party Merge screen, select the “Source” Party and the “Destination” Party. Identify the party and information you want to preserve. In most cases, duplicates will have no information attached at all. Available fields to merge will be visible once the Source and Destination parties have been selected. Fields marked green mean that information in that field will be preserved and will replace the information contained in the corresponding red field.  Fields containing identical information for both Parties will be hidden to simplify the display.
  • In some cases there may be Interview sections that allow multiple entries.  In this case, those fields on the Destination Party will not be highlighted in red, but will be preserved.  These fields will be indicated by a plus-arrow (⥅). You will need to remove these fields manually from the Destination Party if you do not wish to preserve them.
  • All Attachments will be copied to the Destination Party by default.

If you don’t want to replace the information, don’t check off any field.

 

  • The option to Delete the “Source” party is located at the bottom left. This option will allow you to delete the duplicate:

If you click on it, a warning message will pop up:

A last message will pop up after acknowledging the warning and clicking on the Merge Parties button:

Clicking OK will permanently delete the “Source” party, thus eliminating the duplicate.

Copying information from one party to another

If you only want to COPY information from one party to another, select your Source and Destination parties, and check off the fields you want to copy from one party to the other, and then click on the Merge Parties option.

You will see the same warning as before:

Click OK. Your parties will still be in your record, but the information in the Destination party will now be updated according to the fields selected.

Administrators control who can Copy or Merge. To turn on Copy/Merge, the administrator must set a User’s rights to Admin, Copy Party, or Merge Party.