In ContactsLaw, documents are assigned a unique number automatically. However, there are situations where a secondary identifier (such as an item number in a discovery or trial bundle) may be required. To satisfy this need, each document also has a reference field which can hold this identifier.

This field appears as a column in the document explorer and can be maintained via the properties window.

Copy to list

The copy to list facility can be used to assign values to the reference field. These can then be drawn upon in future documents.

If a document already has a reference, the user is prompted to overwrite the value.

Document registration

Reference numbers can also be assigned during document registration, either manually or by deriving a number from the original subject/description of each document.

If you click the 'Add references' button, a popup window appears and prompts for the following parameters:

• Regular expression - Determines how the reference number is matched in the document description. This is a PERL-style regular expression (see also: Registration hint).
• Prefix/formatting - Adds a prefix to the matched reference number. You can also use this to apply advanced formatting by referencing capture groups in the expression, e.g. ABC.$1.XYZ yields the reference number ABC.123.XYZ when matched against the description "Document 123 - Example".

In most cases, the default values for these parameters will be sufficient.