Tip #35 - How To Set Your  'Top Search' Defaults in User Preferences

If you have been using SmartAdvocate for any length of time, you probably have realized there are numerous notifications that the system sends you automatically via email. Some examples include when a document has been added to one of your cases, when you have been assigned a new case, when one of your cases has been closed, etc. Depending on your preferences and/or job functions, you may or may not want some of these automatic notifications. You can customize which notifications you want to receive using “User Preferences.”  In addition to email notifications, however, there are some additional options you can set on the User Preferences Page. They include settings for “Top Search,” “Documents and Emails” and “Styles.”

The User Preferences configurations page is accessed by clicking on your name in the top right corner of your screen, then clicking on ‘User Preferences’ from the resulting drop-down menu.

Over the next several weeks will be looking at some of these settings (as well as email notifications) and will discuss the options available in each. For this week, let’s take a closer look at the options available in ‘Top Search.’

Top Search
The Top Search setting will allow you to designate the default choice for how top searches are performed – you can have the top search automatically search ‘Open’ cases only, ‘Closed’ cases only or ‘All’ cases.
 
It is possible to designate whether your search results open in a new tab/window automatically, and use ‘Mode’ to dictate how searches are done, i.e., you can search using ‘Contains,’ ‘Begins With’ or ‘Exact Match,’ in order of restrictiveness, with ‘Exact Match’ being the most restrictive.
 
You can set the default search criteria to one of the following: Case # / Plaintiff Last Name, Claim #, Date of Birth, Date of Incident, Defendant Last Name, Docket/Index #, E-Mail Address, Phone #, License Plate #, Driver License #, Policy #, SS# or Defendant Insurance Code.

Please note that you can also use the asterisk (“*”) function to customize your search when your search mode is not set to “Contains”. For example, if your search mode is set to “Begins with”, but you want to find someone with the last name “[Something]stein”. You can then search for the “*stein” and find all plaintiffs with last names that contain “stein”. If your search mode was set to “Exact match” the same search would return all plaintiffs with last names that ends with “stein”. A search using “R*stein” will return all plaintiffs with last names that start with R and end with or contain “stein”.