Contact Management & List Building

Contact management and list building

This guidance is designed to walk users through a contact record, demonstrate how to merge contact records. Build a list using a basic selector, manually or using the practice analysis report

To access LEX Marketing, select the LEX menu, Marketing and select from the options within the menu

Dashboard – Gives an overview of all events and newsletters, attendee numbers, opens, clicks etc. As well as showing an events diary, which is separate to the main LEX diary.

Selector – The selector allows you to create lists from your database based on contact information. This can be as simple as generating a list based on all active contacts, or more detailed drilling down to the area of law, whether consent has been agreed, geographical location. The selector can help generate a list for a very specific seminar, only selecting contacts in Manchester who fall under the category of PI and / or Insurance who have previously expressed interest in communications for events in those practice areas.

Saved Filters – Each time the selector is used, it saves the criteria used as a saved filter. Meaning you can go back and reuse this in the future without building a new selector. You can also reuse an old filter but make changes, for example the event in Manchester will also be held in London, you can use the criteria previously used but change the ‘City = field’

Saved Lists – This will hold any selector results you have saved as a saved list, any lists manually created and any lists generated and saved from the practice analysis report. Saved lists can be updated and amended or refreshed when needed.

Marketing Campaigns – A grid view of all events and newsletters

New Campaign – Use this to create a new campaign with a view to adding contacts to it at a later date. Get a head start on the content of the templates before finalizing your recipient list.

View Email Templates – Review your marketing templates in LEX. If you have multiple styles for events or newsletters you can see them all here, showing an example of what they will look like in a campaign.

Online forms – Create workshops for events, newsletter sign up link for your website, consent forms, BSB questionnaires, feedback forms. There are a number of uses for online forms which are referenced in a separate guide.

Contact Management

This section will cover the contact record overview, how to merge contacts / companies and how to manage a contact who has moved to a different company.

Contact record overview

Below is an image of a typical contact record within LEX. Each chambers has slightly different security set up within these screens, either by design or due to the way data was recorded in a legacy system.

The Contact record shows a number of tabs in a line at the top along with the options menu

Options:

Merge This contact – Option available within both a contact and a company record. More information later in the guide
Send Consent Email (With LI) – LEX Online forms users only. A custom email template can be created for consent to send on an ad hoc basis, which will include the Privacy notice. With LI will mark the contact as legitimate interest.
Send Consent Email (No LI) – As above but with no legitimate interest.

From a marketing point of view the tabs of interest might be:

Details – The main contact information page, detail on next page
Marketing *Image below* – This is where you can create a Speaker / Author profile for your contacts (The same tab and option is available within each Barrister record too) to use within a newsletter or event mailing. You can also see within here which saved lists and campaigns this contact is assigned to. This is also available on company level from the company record.
Privacy and Consent – All consent history and selections are shown in here. More detail within the LEX GDPR Guide. *LEX Online forms users only.
Consent Form – See what the contact selected within the consent form. More detail within the LEX GDPR Guide. *LEX Online forms users only.

Some of the key areas within the contact record have been marked in RED on the image below.

Status – Usually a contact has a status of either Active or Inactive / Left firm, chambers are able to define available options within this box to assign more a more relevant status. (Via UDF and Group Edit)

Company – This is the company that the contact is assigned to

Email – The main email address for this contact. If the clerks have a separate email address for billing, this will show within the address panel on the right-hand side. A system option can set this field as mandatory and in addition, force a format of XX@XX.XX to ensure that this box isn’t filled with aa blank space or a full stop.

Marketing Emails Unsubscribed – Contacts have the option within each marketing email to unsubscribe. If chambers use LEX Online Forms, the contact can select their preferences. If chambers do not use this, when the contact selects to unsubscribe, this will mark them as unsubscribed from all marketing communications.

Marketing Consent Received – This will show if the contact has given their marketing consent, and to the right you will see the date of that agreement. *Only for LEX Online Forms users.

Areas of Law – By default there are several areas of law available within this selection, contacts can be assigned multiple areas if needed. This information can be used to filter a marketing list via the selector. The options available within this section are changeable via the UDF and Group Edit. Good practice would be to have your practice areas listed within here, so the assigned area of law correlate with your own practice areas.

Marketing Groups – This section can be used however chambers decide would be useful. The options available are set via the UDF and Group Edit. A suggestion of how to use this would be to use assign areas of interest that don’t fall under your practice areas, examples such as: Newsletter / Seminars / Networking / Golf Day / Summer Party / Client User Groups / Direct access

Direct Access contacts

Although its unlikely you will need to market to direct access clients, it would be useful to understand how these are managed as contacts in the system. We recommend 2 ways for the clerks to manage direct access clients:

Option 1 – Create a new company and contact record for each direct access client under the person’s name

Company – Bob Smith

Contact @ Above company – Bob Smith

Downside to this is it increases the number of company and contact records in the system.

Option 2 – Create a Company called ‘Direct Access’ (or chosen wording) and add individual direct access clients as contacts against that company.

Downside to this is the clerks need to amend the correspondence address on each DA case.

Managing a contact who has moved firms

Example - Bob Smith is moving from ‘Jones & Co’ to ‘DGT & Co’

Within Bobs contact record, remove the company link to Jones & Co and replace with DGT & Co. At the point of saving, the pop up will prompt to confirm the choice and warn how many cases Bob Smith is associated with and advise to either select a contact to replace Bob OR leave the contact on the cases blank.

Merging Contacts / Companies

Within the options menu in the company and contact records, you have the option to Merge.

**NOTE You can only merge contacts that are at the same company. If they are not, they will need to be moved before merging.

** Once a merge is confirmed, this cannot be undone by chambers or Bar Squared. If someone merged 2 contacts in error, all of the case records will now sit under the 1 contact record and to put back, would be done manually by chambers.

Select this option and follow the instructions within the pop ups:

ß 1) Confirm start of merge process

ß 2) Select contact to merge with

ß Confirm merge

List Building

There are 3 main ways to build a list in LEX, the Selector, Manually and via the Practice Analysis report. Description and examples found below

Manually – Create a list from scratch, for example a Barrister might send a list in an excel document to you to include within your campaign, you can add each name to the list individually.

Selector – Use this to pull a list based on the information within the contact record.

Practice Analysis – This report is looking at case data rather than contact data. Using the report filters you can simply create a list of your top 50 Contacts (and/or firms) in the last 18 months in a particular work area, by utilizing the BMIF area of practice or the Case type. Or you can review per team, individual barristers etc.

Manual List Building

From the LEX menu or the tabs in the marketing suite, select Saved Lists. This will display all saved lists in a grid allowing you to search. To open an existing list, double click on the name. To create a new list, select the add new icon in the top right.

The pop up will ask you to give the list a name and select whether it will be a list for Contacts or Companies. Once completed, click save. This will open an empty grid, select the add new icon from the top right or select ‘Add members to list’ from the Options menu. Within the pop up, you can add individuals or import from another saved list. (enabling you to merge lists together)

Selector

The Selector can look daunting, but when used with relevant examples, it does become clearer and is a great tool for grouping / extracting contacts.

Select at the top whether you are looking for Contacts (most used and used in example below) or another field. Then give the selector a name, this will be the name used when it saves to Saved Filters.

To begin, click the dropdown where you see the word ‘Select’. You will see a long list of categories related to the contact, from the date, status and who they were created by, to areas of law, marketing groups and the consent fields.

A very basic example to understand how this works would be to use the field ‘First Name’. If you selected ‘First name’ then Equals then entered John in to the box on the right, when you generate this you will see a list of all contacts in the system where their first name is John.

When selecting your main category you’ll see the box that displays ‘Equals’ above, defaults to Equals, there are other options, for example to generate a list of everyone apart from John, you can select ‘Does not equal’. So LEX will choose all records where the ‘First Name’ box contains anything apart from John.

To create something more relevant / complex, use the other fields in the same way. Example below looks at using the status and area of law fields. These fields contain pre-determined data so rather than typing John as the previous example, you’ll need to select from pre-determined options. (Managed via UDF & Group Edit)

You may be holding an event where you want to include more than 1 of the same category, 2 different areas of law for example. In which case select 2 areas of law from the drop down, then link them. They can be linked as AND or OR. To the left of the category, areas of law in this example, there is an arrow, click that next to each area of law and choose ‘Select’. You can then use the link buttons in the top right, shown below.

Grouping as AND will ask the system where the contact has both areas of law stored in their profile.

Grouping as OR will ask the system where the contact has one or the other.

The same process applies to other areas within the contact profile.

Related Fields

At the bottom of the first drop down, you can find related fields. In here you will find links to cases, consent, company and addresses. This can be used to narrow your search to a particular type of case, only select contacts who have case with fees associate etc. This example will show linking the address field so we can look at a geographical area.

Select Addresses from the drop down, this will open up a new area in the selector for you to select an address related field. You can filter by any address field, the most popular being City, Country or County. If needed you could drill down as far as postcode. In doing so rather than using the ‘Equals’ or ‘does not equal’ options, you could use ‘Begins with’ or ‘Contains’. For example rather than entering ‘City = Leeds’, you could use ‘Postcode Begins with LS’. That would pick up all postcodes within the group of 29 districts of Leeds rather than just looking at the city.

The related fields work in the same way as the basic fields we have used above. You can create very complex selectors but the way it is used is very simple, provided there is an understanding of the basic principles.

To run the selector and review the results, in the bottom right hand corner you will see 3 options:

Reset – Clears the Selector for a fresh start.

Run Marketing Wizard – This will run the selector and advise how many contacts were found, without viewing the results you gave the option to create a campaign and include the contacts in the campaign.

Save And Select – Runs the selector and displays the results in a grid to enable you to review & amend the results before saving for later use or creating a campaign.

Within the results grid, the options you see in the top right are as follows:

Wizards Hat Icon – Open Campaign wizard. This will allow you to create a campaign using the results from your search.

Add New Icon – Use to add more contacts to this results list, by manually selecting from a search.

Save Disc – Use this to save your results into a saved list. Remember the results from the selector are shown but they are not a saved list just yet. Use this option to save the results to use later.

Excel Icon – Export this grid into Excel. Column formatting and layout is carried over to Excel.

Configuration Icon – Use this to personalize / tidy up the results grid. A tutorial on this is available within the learning centre in LEX.

The Options Menu contains the following:

Mail Merge Letters – Have letter templates set up in the LEX system documents to then use these results for a mail merge

Mail Merge Labels – Have label templates set up in system documents to use for a mail merge of labels OR nametags. These are created using merge fields from the contact record so can include just their first name or include their full name and company name, custom logos can be added too. Speak to Bar Squared Support to set these up.

Save List – Save the selector results to Saved Lists

Create Report – The results from the selector can be pulled through to an Aged Debt report, Payment Summary or Practice Analysis report. This option is also available from within a campaign for post event analysis.

Each Selector you generate saves a copy in the Saved Filters tab. Right click on one of the saved items for options:

Edit Selector – Opens up the Selector with the criteria loaded. If you wish to use the same criteria but change for a different city for example, change the city field and give the selector a new name before generating. Now you can reuse either of them at any time.
Build List – This does not show the selector criteria but will regenerate results based on the saved criteria
Delete – Deletes the saved criteria

Practice Analysis Report

The PA report allows you to create a contact mailing list based on case data. Enabling you to filter your list based on existing contacts and the information assigned to them via cases. The available filters are shown below with some examples:

Top 20 contacts who have given chambers PI work this year to date
All contacts who have instructed chambers in the last 5 years
All contacts who have instructed one individual or team over a period / in a particular practice area
All contacts from the top 25 Companies
As above but in specified practice areas or teams.

To use the PA report to generate a list for marketing, very few fields need to be used, you could run this by simply entering a date range and ‘Contact’ in to Analysis field 1 and that would give you all contacts who have given chambers work in that date range. You can also pull together much more complex filters.

To run the first example given, the screenshot below shows what is required to achieve this. The fields needed are:

Date
BMIF Area of practice – Any other filter/s can be used instead of or in addition
Analysis Field 1 – To use the results in marketing, ‘Contact’ MUST be used in one of the analysis fields, it does not matter which if the report is being used for the report data and list
Data to Display – The system will have a default set, usually work done, select additional categories if required
Display Top # - only use this to only show the top XX number

Once you have created the filter requirements, select ‘Generate’ in the bottom right-hand corner. This will generate the report in the usual way, so the data can be displayed and reviewed if required. To jump straight into creating a marketing list, once generated, select the Options menu, and select ‘Save Contact Data’.

Then give your list a name and select Save. At this point, LEX will take you away from the PA results and open up the contact results in marketing as a saved list. This list is found under saved lists and is saved until it is deleted manually.

**NOTE. Saved Filters and Saved lists can not be recovered once deleted.

Saved Lists

Saved lists are found under the Saved Lists tab. To review one, double click to open. The options available within a saved list are detailed below:

Within the saved list, the options you see in the top right are as follows:

Wizards Hat Icon – Open Campaign wizard. This will allow you to create a campaign using the results from your search.

Add New Icon – Use to add more contacts to this results list, by manually selecting from a search.

Excel Icon – Export this grid into Excel. Column formatting and layout is carried over to Excel.

Configuration Icon – Use this to personalize / tidy up the results grid. A tutorial on this is available within the learning centre in LEX.

The Options menu can be found in the top left

Mail Merge Letters – Have letter templates set up in the system documents in LEX to then use these results for a mail merge

Start Marketing Campaign – Create an event or newsletter from this saved list, pulling all contacts from this list into the campaign.

Add New Members to list – Add individual contacts or import from another saved list, effectively merging lists

Remove Selected Members – Use the check boxes to select contacts to remove

Excel Export from Selected – Exports the list to excel but only includes those who have the box checked

Merge with Another list – Choose another list to merge with and they will merge under the new specified name. The old lists will remain

Save List – Save the selector results to Saved Lists

Refresh List – Explained below

Add All Members To – Hover over this option to see the options on the right, if you need to add all members to an Area of Law, Marketing Group, Marketing Area or a New list, select this option, choose the relevant option from the menu, you will then be asked to select the area. For example to add all members to the Area of Law of ‘Banking’ I would choose, Areas of law, then in the pop up I would select the area of law of banking then save. This will add the ‘Banking’ Area of Law to all contacts in that list.

Add Selected Members To –As above but only for the contacts selected

Add Filtered Members To – As above but only for the contacts filtered via the search grid columns at the top of the grid.

** TIP** If you wanted to assign the Area of Law of ‘Banking’ to all contacts in the system that have given work in that area. You can use the practice analysis report to generate that list, based on case type / BMIF Area of practice (each chambers records cases differently, check the setup of the cases before doing this). Once you have saved the list from the report, use the options above to assign the Area of Law to all those contacts. It’s a huge time saver if you’re applying a new Area of Law to thousands of contacts OR want to populate all existing contacts in the database based on your practice areas.

Refreshing Lists

In the Options menu within the saved list, you have the option to refresh list. This should only be used on lists created using the selector. When you select this option, you will see the pop-up screen below.

The refresh option looks at the criteria used to create the list and checks those options again

It will provide you with the option to Add / Remove the following:

Contacts that did not meet the criteria previously but now do, including new contacts.
Contacts that no longer satisfy the criteria
Contacts manually removed but still satisfy the criteria
Contacts that were manually added and do not fit the criteria

At the top of this pop up you can select which list to view and decide to act, which you can do by using the tick boxes next to the relevant contacts.

Once you have made the required changes select Continue to Confirmation in the bottom right.