One of the ways law firms add a personal touch to their client interactions is through their letters. Court forms and other filings have to follow rigid formatting guidelines, but letters with a sophisticated letterhead and a clean layout make a strong first impression. These customized letters can take a lot of judicious editing and copy-pasting to manually craft in a word processing application like Microsoft Word, but MerusCase's merge capabilities lets firms take a base design, or template, and quickly fill the letter out with case-specific details.

A MerusCase merge field, before the template is merged.

Merging a template in MerusCase starts with a Word document with formatting and content specific to that letter, like overall layout, fonts, and general wording. Case-specific information is then added to these templates through the use of pieces of code called merge fields: put <> and <> into the body of the template, and "The applicant, <>, was injured on <>" automatically becomes "The applicant, John Sample, was injured on 01-01-2013."

MerusCase comes with about a hundred commonly-used, generic templates (like "Letter to Claims Adjuster" or "Proof of Service"), allowing even brand new firms to start merging templates out-of-the-box. Firms may also  customize their templates: if they provide us with their own commonly-used office letters, we can convert them from legacy formats, add in the appropriate merge fields, and make them available for use in all cases in Merus.

Templates may even be customized to automatically show  different letterheads for different locations within the same firm. A firm with multiple offices can have a unique letterhead and address for each office, allowing the same set of templates to be used across the whole firm without maintaining separate "Opening Letter - Office A" and "Opening Letter - Office B" templates. Switch the associated office in a case's details in Merus, and the letterhead and any <> merge fields in templates will also switch for that case.

Once users have merged a template and made any desired edits, they can use the  Save To Merus feature in Merus-merged documents to save directly back to the case. Pushing the Save To Merus button opens a secure FTP connection to MerusCase's servers and uploads the document to the original case's activity list. This one-click QuickSave is available for ANY Word document downloaded from MerusCase, including previously-uploaded documents in the case's activity list.

21st-century document handling is just one of many features MerusCase offers to save users time and effort, but it's one of MerusCase's most popular features: many firms merge dozens of templates a day, and updating via QuickSave to a centralized location online ensures all users at the firm have access to the most up-to-date versions of case documents.

                                Written by Paul Bertucci, Migration Coordinator and Technical Support Engineer at MerusCase