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"Decedent's Estate" is a poor descriptor for matters - ideas?

  • 28 March 2023
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J
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  • JG3
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Looking for help from the community….

For Estate Administration work, we’re not happy with the SB default when referencing a matter, which is “reference number-client-matter type”.  So, for any given estate admin matter, it’ll be listed as

“230012 - John Doe - Decendent’s Estate”

That’s not workable for us as we have many clients for whom we are handling several different estates, for example, an adult child with both parent’s separate estates.  The matter names are virtually identical (except for the reference number).  It’s a slight chore and mystery when searching and sorting reports and files b/c of this naming convention. 

Also, we usually reference the estate, the decedent’s name, when working with files - it’s more common than naming the client/executor.

The workaround so far is to provide a more appropriate name in the matter description - which helps for invoicing purposes - but doesn’t help for SB day-to-day use.

Anyway, for estates, it would be best if SB defaulted to the description name when listing matters.  Hopefully that will be improved in the future.

In the meantime, how have other estate admin folks been handling this?

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Best answer by JKibler 28 March 2023, 16:48

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J
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@JG3 - I have previously expressed to Smokeball the need for programmatic customization of descriptions and the re: line according to user specified criteria. I have a high volume eviction practice with regular landlord clients and manually changing each matter’s description box is critical to sending out invoices that are intelligible by the clients. In your instance however you likely have significant overlap of the parties (in my situation at least the defendants are generally different).

It is not clear to me which lists you are referring to. Two ideas:

  • Assuming that you have edited the [description], you can make [description] visible in the matter/lead view by right clicking the column headers at to and selecting [description]. The columns can be reordered.
  • You can also request custom reports which contain [description]. SB generally quickly satisfies these requests for me.
J
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Thanks JKibler!  Very much appreciate the assistance...

On the question of the most vexing lists: its where [description] is not an option, most notably it’s on the dashboards and selected, important invoice display and reporting.

As a practical matter, estate admin work emphasizes the decadent's name when referencing the matter - no so much the client/executor.  SB will hopefully follow suit. 

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