Managing accurate contact records is essential for keeping your matters organized and avoiding duplicate entries. Smokeball has introduced improvements to make creating and selecting contacts more streamlined and reliable.
Adding a Contact to a Matter
When adding a contact as a party to a matter:
- Navigate to Matter Details
- Select the + sign next to the party type you need to add, or right click on the party type and choose Add [party to the matter]
- A contact selection window will appear
By default, this window opens a Contact Picker, allowing you to quickly search for and select an existing contact from your database.
Creating a New Contact
If the contact does not already exist:
- Click Create a new contact
- Enter the contact’s details (name, email, phone number, etc.)
- Save the contact to add them to the matter
Duplicate Contact Detection
To help maintain a clean and accurate contact database, Smokeball automatically checks for duplicates when creating a new contact.
- When you enter an email address or phone number, Smokeball will search for exact matches in your existing contacts
- If a match is found, it will appear in a dropdown list
- You can:
- Select the existing contact to avoid creating a duplicate, or
- Continue creating a new contact if the information belongs to a different person
This gives you flexibility while helping reduce accidental duplicates.
Best Practices
- Always search for an existing contact before creating a new one
- Use the duplicate suggestions to prevent unnecessary duplicates
- Only create a new contact when you’re sure it doesn’t already exist