What’s new in LeanLaw this month?
June's development focused on improvements to invoice creation, including an expansion to our Custom Fields feature and work towards the appearance of invoices and their emails when they're sent from LeanLaw. These changes are currently in beta, so check out the What's next? section below for more information.
What's next?
Custom Fields in invoice memos
Custom Fields is an expansion of the QuickBooks feature by the same name. With this feature, rather than just being limited to 3 fields, you can do as many as you like by inserting them into your invoice memo.
Here's how it works: a field name can be in your Firm Settings, such as "Patent Number," with that field set to be either matter-specific or client-specific. Then, you can go into a client or matter's Info tab and attach a value to that field, such as "D000123." Then, whenever you create an invoice for that client or matter, the memo field will automatically include "Patent Number D000123." Any fields you leave blank will be considered not relevant to the invoice and left off entirely.
This feature is especially strong if you find yourself constantly applying the same information onto every invoice you send a client. Contact our team today if you'd like to try this beta feature!
Gravity Legal improvements for Client-Accounting firms
Gravity Legal is a service that's been integrated with LeanLaw for some time now, allowing your clients to automatically fill their trust account and pay invoices. However, because LeanLaw and Gravity Legal are separate entities, there's been a lot of steps in getting signed up for Gravity Legal from LeanLaw.
We're making steps to change that by developing more integration with Gravity Legal on your firm's settings page, and laying some groundwork for more customization with your invoice and your invoice emailing, while we're at it.
Our improved Gravity Legal integration will be available for firms that exclusively use client-accounting in mid-July, with full integration coming soon after.
Syncing distributions to QuickBooks as checks for attorneys
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.
June 30, 2022
Added a Gravity Legal authentication page for firms that deal exclusively with client-accounting matters. This effort creates the gravity legal payment link in LeanLaw rather than QuickBooks, laying the groundwork for an upcoming invoice customization feature.
Fixed an issue on the Trust Settings page where the Trust Vendor field could appear blank even after a vendor had been selected.
Fixed an issue where the Show Matters Involving filter could appear blank when the page first loaded, even when results were correctly being filtered by the active user's name.
Improved the appearance of various fields and interactions for the (currently in beta) custom field feature.
Changed how search works on the billing page. Before this fix if you searched for a word that appears within a matter's name, the results would include that matter as well as all other matters attached to that matter's client. Now, only matters containing the searched word will appear.
June 28, 2022
Fixed an issue where invoices were not being marked as paid due to a throttling exception from QuickBooks.
June 27, 2022
Fixed an issue where, if a user checked more than approximately 20 invoices and used the Pay From Trust button to pay all invoices simultaneously, part of the transaction could be rejected from QuickBooks' as spam.
June 24, 2022
Fixed an issue where invoices could not be created if they only contained non-billable items.
June 23, 2022
Changed RE110 from a task code to an activity code and made it opt-in. You can find it in the LEDES page of your Firm Settings with all of the other optional LEDES codes.
June 21, 2022
Fixed an issue where a firm could change their subscription from Pro to Core but be automatically switched back to Pro at their next subscription interval.
Fixed an issue where the Delete and Create Matter buttons would print to the page if a user printed their Clients page while the Show Clients Without Matters checkbox was checked.
June 10, 2022
Fixed an issue where a user would be told they had unsaved changes if they made changes in a matter's Info page, saved, and then attempted to view a different matter in the same client.
June 9, 2022
Updated logo and color across the product to fit the new color scheme.
Added the Real Estate Counsel LEDES code to the Tasks list.
Fixed an issue where payment communication between LeanLaw and Intuit could be overloaded, causing payments to go unrecognized in reports. We fixed this by switching from a system that constantly asks Intuit for changes in the QuickBooks account to a system that constantly listens to Intuit for changes in the QuickBooks account.
Fixed an issue where clients without matters weren't appearing on the Clients page when a user checked the "Show Clients Without Matters" checkbox.
Fixed an issue where Expenses couldn't be searched by the name of the client they belonged to.
Fixed an issue where using a browser's autofill option during matter creation could cause an error.
June 1, 2022
Fixed an issue that caused the expense import to fail.
Fixed an issue where date formats weren't adjusting to the user's location when they used expense export. This caused users outside of the United States to have the wrong date format.
Looking for more changes? You can find last month's release notes here.