What’s new in LeanLaw this month?
Gravity Legal Integration Improvements
You may have noticed a page in your firm settings called Gravity Legal, which allows LeanLaw to integrate with Gravity Legal so your firm can quickly and conveniently receive payments from your clients. Previously, this page recommended some assistance from our support team to get you set up with Gravity Legal. Now, we've made the process intuitive and streamlined, so you can get your firm set up for electronic payments in moments!
Invoice Email Delivery (version 1)
The next big project at LeanLaw is going to give you more control than ever over invoice email delivery. We've just released version 1 of our Invoice Email Delivery settings. With these settings, you can already upload a firm logo, set a subject line with short cuts, and edit the body of your emails. Simply go to your firm's Invoice Email Delivery settings to get started!
Note: Invoice Email Delivery was designed to work with Gravity Legal's electronic payments, so Gravity Legal must be set up in your firm to use this feature.
Email delivery settings is an ongoing project. Expect to see many more options added in the coming months to the Invoice Email Delivery settings page, including options for automatic trust payment, for paying the full account balance, the ability to customize button colors, and more!
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 create 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!
Syncing distributions to QuickBooks as checks for attorneys
Our Distribution page has always been a useful tool for cutting checks, but we've taken it a step further with full redesign, including 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 is available in beta now.
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.
August 30, 2022
Released Gravity Legal authentication 2.0. This feature replaces the previous Gravity Legal settings page with one that has a more automated process to signing up for Gravity Legal. Gravity Legal 2.0 is also required for using the new Invoice Email Delivery settings.
Tweaked the terminology we use in Reports when labeling money collected from a user's work and the total allocation to a user. Changes are as follows:
"Collected" is now "Worked" to more clarify that it's revenue brought in by work, such as hours or fixed fees.
"Share" is now "Worked Share" to clarify that it is the user's share based on their Working %.
"Adjusted share" is now simply "Total" to clarify that this value is the user's total compensation from all allocation amounts.
Added a Show Expenses checkbox to Compensation reports and made user expenses hidden by default on these reports.
Fixed an issue on the Ready to Bill page where a custom time period would appear as broken html during step-by-step invoicing.
August 25, 2022
Fixed an issue where changing the user on a time entry or fixed fee within a draft invoice wouldn't change the user on the time entry or fixed fee itself (it's always worked this way, but a user brought it to our attention that this is causing reports to say different things).
Fixed an issue where users assigned to expenses made in QuickBooks wouldn't appear in the dropdown of Edit Expense modal or the User column of draft invoices.
Fixed an issue where users couldn't remove the LEDES code from an expense while it was in a draft invoice.
Fixed an issue where the buttons on the bottom of the Create Expense modal could overlap with the Amount and Expense Code fields on very low resolution (600x600).
August 22, 2022
Fixed an issue that would block the viewing or moving forward of Draft invoices if the draft invoice had been made in bulk.
August 19, 2022
Fixed an issue where credits could partially appear as revenue if attached to multiple invoices with partial payments.
Fixed some issues that could cause payments to not appear in LeanLaw, resulting in inaccurate revenue reports.
Fixed an issue where the Period Report could surpass memory limitations, causing it to fail to load.
Fixed an issue where two scroll bars would appear side-by-side on the Time Entries screen at lower resolutions.
August 12, 2022
Fixed an issue where the Android logo on our Tools Settings page didn't use a transparent background, which caused it to have a different style than the other logos.
Fixed an issue where the Receivables report could be misaligned by one column if a firm used client Ids but not matter IDs.
Fixed an issue where the Create Time Entry modal, as well as several others, could have inaccessible buttons at lower resolutions. We've made it so the user can now scroll down whenever these modals extend below the visible page.
August 3, 2022
Added Working percentage as a modifiable allocation setting at the firm level and at a matter level. Working has always existed as "Share" in payment Allocation Details and is the percentage that a user earns from their time entries and fixed fees which they worked on.
Added the ability to change whether your Firm Share or Working percentage is the "calculated value" for allocation purposes. Whichever value is marked as calculated will be automatically calculated after other values like Responsible, Origination, and Referral have been allocated.
The setting to enable or disable write-downs has been moved from the Reports setting page to the Firm Info setting page (look under Options).
Fixed an issue where the green bar which appears on the Calendar page's mini calendar could suggest there were time entries on an incorrect day because of time zone differences.
Removed the graphics in step-by-step invoice creation which suggest the memo field can be edited. This hasn't worked for a while and we decided to encourage users to edit memos at the Draft stage.
Looking for more changes? You can find last month's release notes here.