De-clutter your contacts in Merus with the Duplicator Removal Tool.

It’s bound to happen. An entire firm working late into the night on a case together—somewhere, somehow—there’s going to be duplicates. Perhaps a paralegal made a mistake in the spelling of a company’s name or maybe the court somehow misspelled a plaintiff’s name. It doesn't really matter how these duplicate contacts are created, but if not maintained, these duplicate contacts might build up in the system creating confusion and complications within your workflow.

I've run into this problem myself when using our automatic case creation tool - the Adjudication Unit (ADJ) Importer Tool - a tool specifically designed to import data from the Division of Workers' Compensation in California and generate a case in Merus. As an employee who helps migrate firm's data into Merus, this tool changed everything. Instead of taking fifteen to twenty minutes to create a case, it only took me five minutes. I'm not even exaggerating. Except, after using the tool for quite a bit, I noticed that we were creating a new company for every lien claimant, every insurance company, when I really just wanted to add them to the case—because they're already in my firm as a contact. As you can imagine, I suddenly had duplicates of almost every contact! With so many duplicates, I didn't want to go searching through my contacts and delete them all.

 

 

But good news for me! And you too because we've added a tool to handle all of the duplicates in this release. If you have three versions of the same company, each of them tied to different cases, then our de-duper will merge them into one company. And before you say, “I need five of these companies, they all have different addresses under the same name.” Sit back and relax, it’s not even an issue because we've accounted for that in our algorithm. When a contact differs from another contact too much, the contacts won’t be merged.

 

In the process of reaching out to some of our users, specifically users who had a sizable number of duplicates in their firm, I heard a lot of excitement about the new tool, but most of them asked about how it functions. The de-duper is very conservative when merging your contacts and it won’t merge them unless every field (including the name, address, phone number, etc.) is within one letter difference of the duplicate contact. To use the above example, if you have multiple companies with the same name, it won’t merge them if the addresses are different. If there's any significant difference in any of the fields, then the algorithm ignores the contact and processes the next one. On the other hand, you might have fifteen contacts that are exactly the same, each assigned to different cases, and you want them merged into one contact. I find this very useful when I want to see all the cases related to a contact. Which is exactly why we created this tool: to make your work easier on you. To learn more how to use the Duplicator Removal Tool, see our help article entitled " How do I remove duplicate contacts?". 

 

The duplicator removal tool may seem like a small detail in the scheme of things, but it just shows how committed our engineers are to making Merus easier for me. :) Okay, and you too. Seriously though, they want to make it as easy as possible for you to make your case in court. They're always refining Merus, including, but not limited to, the incremental improvements to Workflow, Email, and Settlements that are also in this release. We released this last Monday on November 4th and we have already heard a lot of positive feedback - which we love. Let us know how the Duplicator Removal Tool has helped you in the comments below!