Clio Contacts

Clio Contacts

Overview

A contact in Clio is a person or a company. Contacts exist independently of any single matter — the same contact can be the client on one matter, opposing counsel on another, and a witness on a third. Tools: clio_contacts_list, clio_contacts_get, clio_contacts_create, clio_contacts_update. Navigate into the contacts domain first.

No delete tool exists for contacts — same rule as everywhere else in this integration (see api-patterns). A contact that's no longer relevant doesn't get removed through this integration.

People vs. Company Contacts

Clio contacts come in two shapes:

Type	Examples	Notes
Person	An individual client, an opposing party who is a person, a witness, an individual attorney at another firm	Has first/last name fields
Company	A corporate client, an opposing party that's a business entity, a vendor	Has a company/organization name; may have associated people (e.g. a primary contact at the company)

When creating a contact, get the type right up front — person vs. company determines which fields are meaningful (a company doesn't have a first/last name; a person isn't "incorporated"). If a user describes an entity ambiguously ("Acme" could be a company or could be shorthand for a person at Acme), ask rather than guess, especially before creating a new contact — search first (see below).

Contact ↔ Matter Relationships

A contact's relationship to a given matter is contextual, not a fixed property of the contact itself. The same contact record might be:

• Client — the party the firm represents on the matter (every matter has exactly one client contact — see the matters skill)
• Opposing party — the other side in the matter
• Witness — someone with relevant testimony or evidence, not a party
• Other matter-specific roles the firm tracks (co-counsel, expert, guardian ad litem, etc.), depending on how the firm uses Clio

Don't assume a contact's role from one matter carries over to another — the same person can be a client on one file and a witness on an unrelated file. When summarizing "who's involved" in a matter, resolve the relationship per-matter rather than trusting a contact's role from a different context.

Searching Before Creating

Law firms accumulate large contact lists with overlapping names (multiple "John Smith"s across different matters is normal, not a data quality problem). Before calling clio_contacts_create:

1. Search existing contacts (clio_contacts_list with a name/company filter) — check email address and company affiliation, not just name, to disambiguate.
2. If there's a plausible existing match, confirm with the user rather than silently reusing it or silently creating a duplicate — both are real failure modes in a system where contacts persist across many matters and years.
3. Only create a new contact once you're confident it doesn't already exist.

Creating and Updating Contacts

• Person: first name, last name are the minimum meaningful fields; email/phone are commonly expected for anyone who'll be communicated with directly.
• Company: the organization name is the minimum; consider whether the firm also wants a primary person contact linked at the company for day-to-day communication.
• Updates (clio_contacts_update) are scoped to a single contact ID — send only the fields actually changing.

Contact data is comparatively low-sensitivity relative to matter content (communications, documents), but it's still client PII — don't populate fields with guesses, and don't merge/overwrite existing contact data without the user's explicit intent.

Related Skills

• Clio API Patterns — connection, navigation, scope limits
• Clio Matters — the matter a contact is linked to, and the client relationship
• Clio Time & Billing — activities and bills, which reference the matter, not the contact directly