The Contact Page

A contact is a person or company in your system. Its page is built from sections: labeled panels and tabs. A contact isn’t a case or lead, so it has a slightly different set than a case or lead. (New to the idea? See Sections of a record.)

The Head of the Contact

The top of the page is the contact’s identity:

• Name: first, middle, and last for a person; just a first or last name is enough to save. Flip Is Company and the name becomes a single Company Name instead (and the Relationships section becomes Employees).
• Aliases: other names the person goes by. These aren’t cosmetic: aliases are included in conflict checks, so a name your client used elsewhere still gets caught.
• Billing Name: the name the contact prefers on their bills; used on all invoices.
• Company and Job Title: where the person works and what they do, linking them to a company contact.

Like every record, the head also carries the contact’s change history (who changed what, and when), so edits are never anonymous.

Reaching and Identifying Them

• Contact Methods: phone numbers, emails, and addresses, each with attributes that control how Outlaw uses them.
• Identification: forms of ID on file.
• Intake & Custom Fields: your firm’s own questions for the contact.
• Payment Methods: stored cards and bank accounts.

Connections

• Relationships: the contact’s family ties to other contacts. This is the key difference from a lead or case: a contact has family relationships only, whereas a lead or case has Participants covering legal roles too. On a company contact, this section becomes Employees.
• Leads & Cases: every lead and case this contact is connected to, in one place.

Activity

• Events & Deadlines: dates connected to the contact, including personal ones like a birthday.
• Time Entries: tasks tied to the contact.
• Notes & Attachments: notes and files.
• Private Comments: internal notes, pulling in comments from the contact’s tasks, leads, and cases.

How This Connects

The contact is the firm’s universal spine: one person or company, one record, referenced everywhere it’s needed.

• Flows in. A contact can be created from almost anywhere — inline on a lead, a case, a payment, an expense, an event, or a task — and it gathers that person’s contact methods, identification, intake answers, and family relationships in one place.
• Flows out. That single record is what the rest of the firm points at: the client or participant on leads and cases, the payer on a payment or payee on an expense, a name screened in conflict checks, and the subject of events and tasks. Change a phone number once and every one of them reads the new value.
• In time. Nothing about a contact is overwritten: its Blame Log keeps every edit, and a deleted contact can be brought back from Trash. See How Outlaw Fits Together for the loop.