Tip #25 - Use the ‘Merged Facts’ field to populate your pleadings, etc.

Throughout the litigation of a matter, you may need to include the Incident Facts or allegations of negligence in numerous pleadings or discovery documents such as the Complaint, Answer to Interrogatories, Bill of Particulars, etc. In general, your Intake Staff would have entered a brief synopsis of the incident facts during the Intake process. This is typically entered on the Incident/Injury Screen in the field labeled ‘Facts.’

Quite often the Incident Facts as entered during the intake process, are cryptic, may not be grammatically correct and may not be complete – hardly the way you would want those facts to appear in your pleadings!(For internal documents, on the other hand, you may want to use the merge code for “regular” facts to populate things such as the email template used for “brief summary.”)
 
After you have completed the intake and generated your new case (lead), you can always go back to the Incident Screen to update information as appropriate. Also, the Incident Screen will have another field that is now available labeled ‘Merged Facts.’ You can enter information in the ‘Merged Facts’ field that is then merged into your Pleadings, Discovery Responses, etc. You would want the information entered in the Merged Facts field to be grammatically correct and entered the way you want said information to appear in your documents.

Use the merge code <! [INC-MERGABLE-FACTS] !> in your template to have the Merged Facts inserted in your document. Here are examples of the portions of a template for a Bill of Particulars and the resulting finished document after it has been merged using the ‘Incident Mergeable Facts’ merge code.
 
Template

Merged Document