In
ContactsLaw,
relationships between
contacts can be modelled, enhancing the richness of stored information and making it easier to identify conflicts of interest, families, related companies and other types of relationships.
There are two principal types of relationships; those which are defined internally and those which can be added and configured dynamically. The former type includes the following relationships:
- Associated entity - used to express an individual's main employer, or an entity which they represent.
- Head office - used to show all of the branches of an entity, or the head office of a branch.
- Marriage - used to relate an individual to their spouse, and vice versa.
- Master client - used to display all slave clients for a master contact, or to identify when a client is enslaved by such a relationship.
- Trustee - used to relate trusts to trustees (and vice versa) and/or executors.
Managing relationships
Relationships between contacts can be established in several ways:
- For simple relationship types such as 'associated entity' and 'spouse', via contact creation
- In tabular form, via the editor on the contact summary tab
- In graphical form, via the 'relationships' button:
User-defined relationships
Additional types of relationships can be defined. For each
contact relationship type, a name must be provided to describe the relationship. Unless it is a peer relationship (i.e. both contacts are equivalent and the relationship is two-way), terms must be provided to describe the relationship in each direction (e.g. "parent" and "child"). Furthermore, restrictions can be imposed on which
types of contacts may be specified in the relationship.
Once a relationship type has been used, it cannot be deleted from the system (unless the relationships are removed).
Some examples of custom relationships types would be:
- A corporate governance relationship where the entity contact has a director and the individual contact is a director of
- A sibling relationship between two individuals
- An associate relationship where the judiciary contact has an associate and the individual contact is an associate for
Relationship types are managed via the Summary section under the CRM tab on The Practice.