When searching through Merus there are more than enough methods to find a case or file in your firm. Each of the methods have different purposes when searching for cases, contacts, and files in your firm. These searches will help you significantly if you don't know every detail of the case and you don't want to look for a file all day. Whether it’s searching through your contacts to add to a case, or typing in a case into a field and it finds the case for you; the different searches in Merus will help you find it.

A field completed based on the text in the field, or an auto-completing field, is designed to find all possibilities based on the limited information given to it. For instance, if you type “st” in the auto-completing field, it will find all the cases with "st" in the applicant and defense names, which might include “Sufjan Stevens”, “St. Johns Hospital”, and “Sean Emerston”.  While the first two results should clearly be found, the last result is found too because of the “st” in “Emerston”. This might seem unexpected, but the auto-completing fields were designed to return all results without excluding any potential results. At the same time, it's very unlikely your searches will only contain a two or three characters.

These auto-completing fields differ from the Browse Cases, Contacts, and Companies sections because you don’t have the option to sort and filter the results. In a case search you can add filters for several different values (Name, Case No., Type, etc.) and you can sort them by all the different values (Status, Staff, etc) in the search results. However, this option isn't available to auto-completing fields and Merus intentionally displays more results than the case, contact, and company searches because it wouldn't be helpful if we excluded any potential cases you might want to include. It's safer to include partial matches, especially with short searches, like "st", to ensure all intended cases are available to you. Not to mention, if you increase the number of characters in the search it will refine the results of the auto-completing fields, such that if you searched “ste” instead of “st” it would only return two of the three previous cases.

The Browse Cases, Contacts, and Companies sections have the benefit of being able to sort and filter the results, which allows you to quickly narrow down the results of cases. But, if you want to search for files, without knowing the case or details related to the case, then you will likely want to do a global search. The global search is a search of all the files in the firm, regardless of the case. This feature is easy to access (the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the screen) and it gives you the ability to quickly find files without filtering the results of your activities. Furthermore, the global search doesn't only search for file names, as with the filters in activities, it searches through all the information in your files.  It will find a word inside a file in addition to the name of the file. This type of search is far more comprehensive and it gives you the ability to find a file with even less information from you.

All in all, Merus has a search for everything in your cases. It auto-completes your fields by searching through your cases, it has a refined search of cases and contacts, and it has a global search of all files and all of its contents. It has everything you need to find your files!