The Matters page has been upgraded!

What's in the new Matters page? 

1. Apply edits across many matters at once. Until now, every change to a matter happened one matter at a time. An attorney leaves and forty matters need a new responsible. A rate change goes into effect and rates must be updated one client at a time. Year-end comes and two hundred closed files need archiving. Each of those meant the same handful of clicks, repeated once per matter — so the work got deferred, and matters quietly drifted away from how the firm actually bills them. Matters billing at a stale rate or missing the LEDES setup a client requires are what turn into written-down invoices and rejected e-bills later.

Now you tick the rows you want and the toolbar changes to show what you can do with them:

• Change Responsible — reassign the responsible attorney across the whole selection.

• Apply Rate Group — set all matters to the same rate group in one step, with an option to update open time entries as well.

• Archive / Unarchive — set your matters to archived for a cleaner and faster UI, or bring them back in bulk.

• Enable / Disable LEDES — choose the format once and apply it..

Every action confirms before it runs, and tells you what actually happened. If some matters couldn't be changed, you'll get a count of the ones that were, and a marker on each row that wasn't, with the reason.

2. Filtering no longer costs you the search box. There is now a Client filter. Narrowing to one client used to mean typing their name into Search, which both consumed the search field and risked catching a matter that merely looked similar — a real hazard when the next thing you do is edit everything you selected. Pick the client instead and Search stays free for the matter you're actually looking for.

The filter row also folds away. Collapse it and it becomes a single filters button plus a badge telling you how many filters are still applied, with Clear All beside it — so you always know why the list looks the way it does, and you can clear it without hunting for the field that did it.
Everything that filtered the old page still filters this one, now in that panel: matters involving a given user as responsible, originating or reviewer; your firm's custom fields; and Show Archived.

3. Rate Group and LEDES are available as columns. Open Columns and turn either one on. Both are sortable, so you can sort the matters with no rate group to the top, select them and fix them in one pass — which is usually the fastest way to find what needs a bulk action in the first place. A matter with no rate group reads as "Custom rates" rather than as a blank.
Your column choice is saved to your login, so the table comes back the way you left it on any machine you sign in from.

 What has not changed

You still reach the list the same way, from the Matters tab.- Conflict Check, Print, Export and Create Matter are all still there, in the same toolbar.- Validate QuickBooks Connection still runs when you ask for it, not on every page load. Once you have run it, the connection column and the connection filter appear, exactly as before.- Your permissions still decide what you can do. A bulk action only appears if you already had the right to make that change on a single matter, and archiving still respects split-billing restrictions.- Selection applies to the matters on the page you are looking at. If a batch runs past one page, work through it a page at a time.- Custom field filters still match one value per field.

Give it a try, and let us know what bulk actions you'd like to see added to the Matters or Clients pages!