Matter Naming Conventions

Actionstep will automatically assign a unique numeric ID to each matter when it is created. You can use this ID to search for matters (if you have a good memory or use a particular matter very frequently), but most commonly you will use the matter name to identify and search for matters.

Matter Names

The matter name is a free-form text field and you can use any convention you choose to name your matters. A few things to bear in mind:

• When viewing matters in a list, you will typically have other columns to help you identify matters like client name, matter type, date created, etc. So you do not need to incorporate these elements into the matter name
• When searching for matters, the Quick Search will match on the matter name field so try to come up with a naming convention that will make this easy.  If you generally only have one matter per client, then using the client name in the matter name could make sense. But if you have many matters for the same client, this could make it difficult to find matters. Bear in mind that the Quick Search also shows you results for contacts that match the search term, so if you can't find it by matter name you can always search by contact name and then open the contact record to see linked matters.
• Avoid using the matter type in the name ("Litigation - Smith", "Litigation - Jones", etc). The matter type appears as a column and you can easily filter the list by matter type or create custom views for each type.
• As a general rule try to pick a naming convention that will give you a lot of diversity in the names. This will help you to identify an matter from a list without having to open it up to find out what it's about.

File Reference

Each matter has an optional File reference field. This is particularly useful when bringing matters across from your old system because it allows you to cross-reference between the matter ID in Actionstep and the ID in the old system.

The File Reference will also show up in the Quick Search results so this can be useful to distinguish matters if many of them have similar names.