Faster Snippets: How Clio Fields are Organized

Let’s take a closer look at how to find Clio tags to be used in the Type Text action.  We’ll go to Faster Suite on the Faster Ribbon, Settings, Text Snippets, Custom Libraries, and click the pencil icon to open the Edit Snippets window.

As we’ve seen in other videos, the right panel is where we can locate any Clio field that we want to use in a snippet.

Clio fields are organized into three categories.

Matter contains fields specific to a matter or client, such as matter description, client email address, or even matter and client custom fields.

Now contains date and time fields so we can enter specific information related to the current date and time.

User contains fields related to the person activating the snippet, so we can easily enter our name, email address, or other contact information.

Each of these collapsible menus has multiple levels.

For example, expanding the Matter collapsible will show us all the information that Clio can tie to a matter.  We’ll see things like Client, Custom Field Values, Description, Practice Area, and Status.

Some of the things that are tied to matters in Clio will have more information under them.  For example, we can expand the Client collapsible to see the things that Clio ties to clients like Addresses, Email Addresses, Name, and Phone Numbers, and some of these fields even have more information under them.  We can expand the Email Addresses collapsible to see that there are multiple types of email addresses stored in Clio for clients.

When searching for Clio fields, try to be aware of how information is connected in Clio.

If we want to find the physical address of the company that our client works for, we should be thinking that the address is part of the company, the company is part of the client, and the client is part of the matter.  We can then work backwards through those steps, expanding Matter, then Client, then Company, then Addresses to find the information we’re looking for.

Additionally, we should be aware of where in Clio we store information.

Instead of having a contact for the company our client works at, we might just store the address of the company under the client’s work address field.  In this case, the work address is one of the addresses we can save, the addresses are related to the client, and the client is related to the matter.  So again, we can work backwards and expand Matter, Client, then Addresses to find the work address.

Being conscious of these things will make it significantly easier to find the information we want when configuring our snippets.