Working with Your Contacts

The Contacts page is your firm’s whole address book in one list: every client, every company, the opposing parties, the referrers, the experts, and anyone else connected to your work. Each row is one person or company, and clicking it opens the full contact described in The Contact Page. This page is about working the directory itself, getting to the right person fast and acting on a group of them at once.

Jumping by Letter

Once your firm has more than a couple dozen contacts, Outlaw puts a row of letter-range buttons across the top, each covering a slice of the alphabet by last name (the ranges adjust themselves so no single group gets too large). Click a range to jump straight to those contacts instead of scrolling. An All button brings the whole list back. The letter buttons step aside automatically while you are searching, since a search already narrows things down, and they only appear once you have enough contacts to need them.

Finding a Contact

The search box matches far more than the name. It looks through each contact’s email addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses, the company a person belongs to, and the roles they play in your cases and leads. With the deeper search options on, it also reaches into intake-form answers, the other people connected through participants, and the text inside attached documents. So searching a street name, a company, or a role finds the contact even when you cannot recall their name. The shared search behavior and its options are covered in Data Tables.

Reading the Columns

A small type icon leads each row and tells you what the contact is at a glance, a person or a company, a client or a lead, one of your own users, or a portal user. The row then shows the name (last, first, with any alias in parentheses), the primary email, phone, and address, each with a one-click copy button, and the roles the contact holds. A contact you have marked do-not-contact is flagged right on its email, phone, and address so you do not reach out by mistake.

Showing Deleted Contacts

Deleted contacts are hidden by default. Turn on Show Deleted to bring them back into view, which is how you find a contact someone removed and, if you need to, Restore it. Restoring is one of the row actions described next.

Acting on Several at Once

Unlike most lists in Outlaw, the Contacts page lets you select several contacts with their checkboxes and act on the whole group. The actions available depend on what you have selected:

• Merge combines two or more duplicate contacts into one, folding their information together. It is the fix for the same person entered twice. Outlaw blocks merges that would not make sense, such as merging two of your own users or mixing a person with a company.
• Restore brings a deleted contact back (visible when you are showing deleted contacts).
• Grant Portal Access invites a client or lead into the Client Portal so they can see their own invoices and documents; Revoke Portal Access takes it away. These appear only for contacts that can have portal access.

Adding a Contact

Use the add control on the toolbar to create a new contact. The only thing Outlaw truly requires is a first or last name; everything else, the emails, phones, addresses, and relationships, can be filled in now or later on the contact’s own page. You can also export the list to a spreadsheet whenever you need your contacts outside Outlaw.