Avoiding Duplicates when Importing

When migrating your firm's data from your current database to Lawmatics you'll want to make sure you don't wind up with any duplicate matters in your account. There are a few simple steps you can take to make sure your migration goes smoothly and without duplicates.

First, it is important to note the difference between contacts and matters in Lawmatics. Every matter will have a primary contact attached, but not every contact will necessarily have a matter.

When running an import, you will be prompted to select whether you wish to import contacts or matters. When matter is selected as the import type, both a contact and matter will be created for each record. On the other hand, when contact is selected as the import type, only a contact will be created for each record on your import spreadsheet.

The following information will help you prevent duplicates from occurring, however if at any point you do wind up with a duplicate, note that you can easily merge duplicates.

Lawmatics has duplicate checking built-in for all contacts, based on the email address field. This means that you will never see more than one contact created in your contact with the same email address. This applies whether you are manually creating a contact or creating contacts from an import.

Since it is possible for the same contact to have more than one matter, this rule does not apply for matters. 

Remember, the duplicate check happens based on email address. It will not check for duplicates based on the contact's name or phone number.

Therefore, if you attempt to run a contact type import that contains multiple individuals with the same email address OR if there are already contacts existing in your Lawmatics account that match the email address of contacts on your spreadsheet, you will not see any duplicate contacts created. 

This happens automatically. By default, any duplicate contacts will simply be skipped over in the import.

Alternatively, you also have the option to update any existing contacts with new information from the spreadsheet as opposed to skipping them. This will still not result in any duplicates, it will simply update the existing contacts with any new data fields from your import spreadsheet.

On the other hand, if your matter type import contains multiple records with the same email address, these will each be created as a unique matter attached to the same contact. This will always be the case if there are records with the same email address on your import spreadsheet.

If there are existing matters in Lawmatics that you wish to update using an import, then you can select the Update Existing Records option as shown above for your Matter type import.

Don't forget that in case you do ever end up with duplicates, Lawmatics makes it very simple to merge duplicates.