What’s new in LeanLaw this month?
Changes to defaults
We’ve collected feedback on the preferences of two of our filters and made some changes to their default behavior. These settings affect the visibility of your Ready to Bill and your reports. Our changes are aimed at making the data that's important to you more easily accessible.
Show Archived
In the Reports pages, we’ve changed the Show Archived filter
Before: reports would load with the Show Archived filter set to Exclude Archived by default
Now: reports will load with the Show Archived filter set to Include Archived by default.
The logic behind this change is that there are far fewer occasions in which you don’t wish to see archived data than occasions in which you do wish to see it.
Include Non-Billable
On the Ready to Bill page, we’ve changed the Include Non-Billable checkbox.
Before: the Ready to Bill page would load with the Include Non-Billable checkbox unchecked.
Now: the Ready to Bill page will load with the Include Non-Billable checkbox checked.
This checkbox determines whether matters that only have non-billable line items will show up in Ready to Bill. It doesn’t affect matters that have non-billable time entries in addition to expenses or fixed fees. This change comes after feedback that some of our users weren’t aware of this checkbox’s existence and had been overlooking such cases.
Performance improvements
We’ve been working on extensive, behind-the-scenes improvements to our code that will reduce the load time of pages that load large amounts of data.
Currently, much of your firm data, such as the names of all of your clients and matters, gets cached the moment that you load LeanLaw for the first time. Similarly, visiting the Expense page loads all of your expenses instead just the page you’re looking at. This method of front-loading information reduces the time it takes to retrieve that data when you need it, but it can cause LeanLaw to take a long time to load if your firm has thousands of clients or expenses.
Our ongoing changes focus on fine-tuning our pages to show only the data that’s relevant to the page you’re on, which will reduce the amount of time it takes to navigate from page to page!
What's next?
Syncing distributions to QuickBooks
Our Distribution page has always been a useful tool for cutting checks, but we want to take it a step further with a "Sync to QuickBooks" button on the distribution page. When pressed, this button will automatically create either a check or a bill (determined by a setting in your Firm Settings) in QuickBooks for each user in your firm to the amount of their distribution. This payroll tool will be ready for beta soon.
Public API
We’re always continuing to develop our 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 securely integrate LeanLaw with other programs, like Sharepoint. This feature is available upon request; please contact LeanLaw if you're interested in exploring our public API.
Update history
As always, we’ve also been hard at work to squash bugs and improve the user interface. Here are the patch notes for our development.
March 30, 2022
Changed the default setting of the Show Archived filter in all Reports pages to be "Include Archived" instead of "Exclude Archived." Changed the default setting of the Include Non-Billable checkbox in the Billing tab of Ready to Bill to be checked instead of unchecked.
Made it so that time entries made nonbillable through the "Make Non-Billable" function in draft invoicing would go to the Services (Not Billed) category in the draft, even going so far as to make the category if one doesn't already exist.
Added limitations to hours (999 hours) and amounts ($999,999,999) of individual time entries to prevent an issue which could lock users out from viewing or editing a time entry.
Changed icons in several areas of the product for compliance issues.
Fixed an issue where origination percentages wouldn't be allocated if a firm had matter-based origination values but nothing set at the firm level.
Fixed an issue where users weren't able to create time entries for other users within a draft invoice.
Fixed an issue where Enforced Rounding couldn't be disabled.
Fixed a rare rounding issue that could cause QuickBooks to reject an invoice for rounding reasons. To fix this, invoices now support 4 decimal places where needed.
Fixed an issue where the "Make Non-Billable" function in draft invoicing would cause the rate to appear as a blank value, instead of a value of $0.00.
Fixed an issue where the Disconnect From QuickBooks and Add Trust Account buttons in Firm Settings wouldn't refresh the page after, giving the appearance that nothing had changed.
March 23, 2022
Fixed an issue that caused some firms to encounter errors when retrieving payment data from QuickBooks.
March 17, 2022
Fixed an issue where edits made to fixed fee Labels wouldn't appear.
Tweaked the behavior of fixed fee labels and descriptions. Previously, if a fixed fee was made without a Label, LeanLaw would duplicate the Description text into the Label. Now, if a firm doesn't provide a label, LeanLaw will leave the Label field blank and defer to the fixed fee's description for preview purposes.
Fixed an issue where fixed fees would appear in the WIP Detail Report regardless of which user was selected.
Fixed an issue where pressing enter in many fields inside a matter tab would cause the page to lock up.
Fixed an issue where some invoicing options wouldn't fit inside of the page.
Fixed an issue where negative expenses couldn't be edited.
Fixed an issue where changing timekeepers on the Calendar page wouldn't update the planner.
Fixed an issue where email restrictions weren't in place during client creation, allowing users to input invalid email addresses.
Fixed an issue where enabling or disabling LEDES inside of a multimatter client, and then switching matters, would cause the page to misload.
Fixed an issue on the step-by-step invoicing page where expense descriptions and values wouldn't automatically update when edited.
March 15, 2022
Fixed an issue that caused a green line to appear through the button that submits invoices to QuickBooks on some browsers, preventing the action.
March 14, 2022
Fixed an issue where invoices with at least one unassigned expense and only other unassigned items (such as fixed fees) would cause the invoice to not appear when filtered by user or by matter.
Adjusted the font size of the Next button in the QuickBooks Expense Sync to make it more readable.
Fixed an issue where a tooltip in the QuickBooks tab of matters was cut off by the matter selector.
Fixed an issue where "Pay" and "Deliver" in the QuickBooks tab of Billing had a button-like appearance but weren't interactable. They now function the same as the dropdown next to them.
Fixed an issue where LEDES codes that don't have a letter would appear as UNDEFINED if previewed in a draft.
Fixed an issue where users couldn't finish an expense with a short code, click Save and New, and then begin the new expense with the same short code.
Fixed an issue where the Show Contingency Matters checkbox on the Ready to Bill page wouldn't show contingency matters unless they had billable line items, or the user also selected the Show Non-Billable checkbox.
Made the Show Non-Billable checkbox and the Show Contingency Matters checkbox on Ready to Bill mutually exclusive. Selecting one will now deselect the other.
March 11, 2022
Fixed an issue where time entries could be entered at the wrong amount if the user didn't have the View Rates permission.
March 7, 2022
Added a Billed by Originating report for beta testing.
Added Total Hours to the Calendar page
Refactored the Ready to Bill page. It should now load quicker in firms with many expenses.
Added some foundation for our upcoming Distribution Sync feature.
Fixed an issue where creating large batches of expenses with "Save and New" could cause the date on the expense to decrease.
Fixed an issue where the daily time preview (green bar) on the Calendar page wouldn't match the day's time entries in certain time zones and with certain start times.
Hotfixed an issue where Quick Create wasn't working on the Ready to Bill page.
Looking for more changes? You can find last month's release notes here.