In Outlaw Practice, every person is a contact.
A user is a contact.
A client is a contact.
The County Clerk's Office is a contact.
A business is a contact.
The guy that sold you an ad for that upscale golf course magazine that totally targets your clientele is a thief. And a contact.
The judge is a contact.
You get the idea. No matter where you are in the program, if you are dealing with something with a name, an email or a phone number, you are probably dealing with a contact. We do not have separate entries for clients and contacts, because that is silly. A client is always a contact (even if a contact is not always a client).
What makes a contact a client is simple: they are included in a case.
The idea is to eliminate double-entry and keep everything related to a contact in one place. When you pull up a contact's record, it is a clearinghouse for information. You can update the contact with:
Basics like name, aliases, nicknames, billing name, and company
Communication preferences (email, phone, mailing addresses)
Two-way Relationships (familial or legal)
Events, like birth date, date(s) of arrest, court dates, etc.
Identification forms, like driver's license #, passport, military id, and SSN
Notes
Their leads and/or cases
Attachments (documents)
Private discussions, no matter where they occurred (lead, case, task, etc.)
Tasks related to the contact, their lead or their case
Custom fields (questions) to cover anything else
You can create a new contact from anywhere you enter a contact's name. It will create the contact record on the fly. You can even create new contacts using a custom field!
You can also mark a contact as a business with a single click. It will show up anywhere contacts are allowed. For example, the County Clerk's Office will likely show up on expenses.
We understand that bad things happen with data entry, so you can always merge two (or more) contacts together, or easily modify the record directly from other places, like a lead. We can't stop your new secretary from entering "Door, Guy that walked in the", but we can make it easy to fix.