Participant Custom Data - For When Your Data Requires More

Nominated by Ettinger Consulting, one of Actionstep's Gold Partners, our latest Feature Spotlight focuses on Participant Custom Data which will help you to save time and reduce errors in your data.

Why We Love 'Participant Custom Data'

The Actionstep 'Participant Custom Data' feature is often overlooked, but once discovered, users find this feature to be incredibly flexible and can be used when matter custom data requires more...

Participant Custom Data helps firms of all sizes to save time and reduce errors. We have also witnessed this feature being utilized by a range of firms with substantial improvements in efficiency.

What is 'Participant Custom Data'?

Participant Custom Data allows you to create custom data for participants on matters. This can be useful in a situation where if you want to collect additional information regarding a client and those fields are not in the contact record, then you can create your own custom fields. For example, if a client has a Customer Number or a Tax Number that never changes and will be used across a variety of matters, you can create a custom data field so that this data can be stored against the contact itself.

Participant Custom Data is available for any participant type in Actionstep and can be used system-wide or limited to the use in a matter.

When Participant Custom Data is limited to the matter, it is only accessible from the matter where the data is entered. That data is not available in another matter in which they are a participant. An example for this use would be a beneficiary in two different probate matters.

When Participant Custom Data is not limited to the matter, it is accessible for each matter. This Participant Custom Data can also be set to include certain things, such as court rules. When these court rules need updating or changing, they will do so to each contact in every matter automatically. One efficient way to use them is in the Court participant type. Adding the Clerk of Court name in a participant custom data field to the Court contact, instead of the Clerk having their own contact record in every matter, will allow you to change it in one spot after an election, instead of every matter. This is also helpful for those often-needed court rules. They can be added into the Court record and pulled into a Custom HTML field in the matter data, and it will pull the correct court rules for the court selected in the matter. No need to research that rule for each case as it will pull in automatically, and when the rule changes, changing it in the contact record will update it in every matter.

The participant custom data also allows you to add a field to every contact type by using the Individual and Company participant types. Adding fields for driver’s license number to the Individual Participant type adds that option to the contact record for every person identified as an individual in your system.

Viewing and editing that data can be done several ways. They are displayed in the contact record in the role section beside the role that they are created under. They can be changed at the bottom of the contact record edit page. They are also displayed in the matter Parties page by hovering over the contact’s name. The data can then be edited by clicking the Edit Data button or by clicking the file menu beside the name and clicking the Edit Data button contained there.

These fields can be used anywhere a merge field can be used. They have their own merge field code format and are listed in the merge field list after they are added to the participant type.

How It Makes a Difference to Law Firms

Participant Customer Data can be used by law firms to further automate their data, improving the efficiency of their firm, and reducing the errors in their data. You can process all the information you need in each matter individually, across multiple matters automatically, and have the freedom to view and edit this custom data easily.

Read more about Participant Custom Data here.