What’s new in LeanLaw this month? After months of beta testing, we’ve released an exciting lineup of new features!
New Client and Matter Pages
Before, clients and matters were both managed in the Matters page, and the only way to view a client or matter’s history was through reports. This update introduces a variety of tools to LeanLaw Core for your client and matter management:
A dedicated Clients page, accessible from the navigation bar.
An Overview tab with WIP information, account summary, and report shortcuts specific to the client or matter you’re viewing.
A Billing Activity tab with all invoice and payment history specific to the client or matter you’re viewing.
The ability to cycle through all matters belonging to a client with the same tab selected, allowing you to compare rates, billing history, and more.
Although your client and matter pages look different, all of the functions you know and love are still there. To learn more about this new feature, check out our help article, here.
New Reports and Reports Page
We've added a WIP, Billed, Collected report to the categories of By Client and Matter, By Practice Area, and By Responsible. The new By Responsible category also has our new Billable report and Collected report. We've also done a huge revision to our Period report, adding the ability to choose custom time units to build your own report. Learn more about all of our Pro reports in our Reports Overview.
To fit all of these new reports, we also changed our Reports page into a tile appearance and reimagined our sorting categories. All of your reports are still there, and you can learn more about navigating or reversing the change here.
Distributions
You could already view allocation details for individual payments, and our revenue by attorney report has helped many of you calculate monthly compensation. However, our new distribution feature in LeanLaw Pro goes one step further, allowing you to assign payments to a distribution, use those distributions as a filter in any revenue report, and view the split for each distribution period according to your firm, responsible, and originating share settings. You’ll still have to write your own checks, for now, but you’re going to love this feature.
Read more about it in our Distributions article, here.
Custom checkbox
The custom checkbox is a customizable checkbox added to time entries and expenses, which gives you a new report to view and compare your activities that used the checkbox. It was originally created for firms who needed a way to separate and report their lobbying activities to the FEC, however, you can name your custom checkbox anything you wish, giving you an additional insight tool for time entries and expenses.
The custom checkbox is a LeanLaw Pro feature enabled in your Firm Setup page by entering a name in the custom checkbox field. This will cause a checkbox with the given name to automatically appear on time entries and expenses, and create a report by the given name in the Reports page. More information provided here!
Equitrac expense tracking
Used in many copiers, printers, and other office machinery, Equitrac software provides a way to track your printing expenses with a simple .csv file. LeanLaw now works with those files. By using the new Equitrac Import button on the Expenses page, you can export your matter list into an Equitrac-compatible .csv or import the expenses tracked from your Equitrac product back into LeanLaw. For more help on how this feature can make your expense tracking easier, click here.
Evergreen retainers
An evergreen trust account is a trust account which requires your client to maintain a minimum balance. You can now track this in LeanLaw Pro in a few ways. Once you set an evergreen amount, that amount will automatically appear in the customizable evergreen trust statement, printed on all invoices for that client. If the trust's current balance is below this amount, the trust statement will also include the amount your client needs to deposit to replenish evergreen account. From LeanLaw, you can also see the evergreen amount for your clients in every trust report, trust page, and matter page that lists the client’s trust balance.
For more information about enabling and using evergreen retainers, check out our article here.
LEDES LSS
We’ve added the LSS format to our LEDES options. To enable LSS, first make sure that LEDES is enabled within your firm’s settings by visiting your firm's LEDES settings here by verifying that “Enable LEDES Billing” is set to Yes. Next, go into the matter for which you wish to use LEDES LSS by clicking Matters on the main navigation, searching for your matter, and clicking on it. Go to the LEDES tab of that matter, make sure “Enable LEDES for this Client” is set to Yes. Then, click the LEDES Format dropdown and select LEDES LSS.
QuickBooks Class Tracking
You can now enable QuickBooks’ class tracking for better integration between LeanLaw and QuickBooks Online. By creating classes for LeanLaw labels, like responsible attorney, practice area, and billing instructions, you can customize your invoices in QuickBooks to show your clients more information. You can use these classes for other QuickBooks features, such as the Profit and Loss report, allowing you to view your LeanLaw data alongside other firm data you track in QuickBooks.
For more information, check out our Class Tracking document, here.
What’s next?
We have some exciting features being beta tested right now. Some firms are already trying out these features, but they’ll be available for all once we think they're ready. Contact our support team if you’re interested in trying any of these beta features.
Public API
We are developing a public API that allows the retrieval of bulk information from firms, such as client contact information, client and matter lists, and more. Developers can use this to integrate LeanLaw with other programs, like Sharepoint. The API is in closed beta; please contact LeanLaw if you're interested in exploring it.
WIP Detail Report
You’re probably familiar with our Ready to Bill/WIP report, which provides a monetary summary of an attorney’s work and expenses yet to be billed across all clients and matters. The WIP Detail Report lists and describes all unbilled time entries across the firm divided according to the user who worked, totaled by user, and totaled across all users. It’s our strongest report yet for viewing monthly productivity, and it should be ready within the next month.
Update history
As always, we’ve also been hard at work to squash bugs and improve the UI. Here are the patch notes for last month’s development.
June 29, 2021
Fixed an issue where custom fields would cause invoices to break if the invoice didn't use all enabled custom fields.
June 26, 2021,
Fixed an issue causing the Trust Account page to not load.
June 25, 2021,
Improved the period report, allowing more time unit selection.
Added a firm option to require user on expense creation.
Fixed an issue in the Revenue by Attorney report that caused tax to be allocated twice if an invoice was paid in partial payments.
Fixed an issue preventing custom fields appearing on invoices if they exceeded a character limit.
June 24, 2021
The CC and BCC, set up in your firm's QuickBooks settings, will now also apply to your Gravity Legal payment requests.
June 23, 2021
Fixed totals in the WIP detail report not properly exporting .csv.
Fixed Revenue by Attorney not properly exporting to .csv.
Fixed Caterpillar LEDES codes.
Fixed the “This Week” time period filtering Monday to Sunday. It now filters Sunday to Saturday.
Fixed an issue causing the new client UI to print improperly.
June 17, 2021
Made some suggested adjustments to the WIP Detail report.
Fixed some printing issues in the new client UI.
Fixed alignment issues in the custom checkbox report.
Fixed the By User filter in Expenses not properly filtering.
Released several features to Core and Pro LeanLaw that were previously only available to beta testers (new client and matter pages, distributions, Equitrac expense tracking, LEDES LSS, QBO Class Tracking, Evergreen retainers, custom checkbox).
June 15, 2021
Added the WIP Detail report for beta testing.
June 11, 2021
Reconfigured email invitations.
June 8, 2021
Fixed a rounding issue with fixed fee allocations.
June 3, 2021
Fixed an issue where Distributions sometimes wouldn’t load in reports
June 2, 2021
Fixed an issue where “Copy billing info from client” sometimes wouldn’t remember the previous client.
June 1, 2021
Fixed an issue where undated fixed fees would ignore Time Period filters in reports, showing up in all time periods.
Looking for more updates? You can find last month's release notes here.