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New in LeanLaw: November 2022
New in LeanLaw: November 2022

Release notes: LEDES settings, Email Activity Log, email delivery improvements, bug fixes, and more!

Doug Schmierer avatar
Written by Doug Schmierer
Updated over a week ago

What’s new in LeanLaw this month?

New LEDES Settings

Some of our clients' invoices were being rejected because an attorney would accidentally use a general LEDES code when a specific LEDES code was required, or the LEDES code wasn't specific enough in the description.

To assist, we've added two settings:

  • You can now choose whether or not selecting a LEDES code will automatically populate the Description field with that LEDES code.

  • You can now disable "generalized" LEDES codes, such as A100 Activities, which mostly serves as a category header for more specific LEDES codes.

Both of these Settings are found in the LEDES settings page and are aimed at enforcing standards in LEDES line item creation. Enable these settings today to enforce better practices at your practice!

Email Activity Log

The Email Activity Log (currently located in your Firm Settings) allows firms to track the progress of any email sent through LeanLaw's email delivery service. The moment an email is sent, it gains the status of Processing, which means we're waiting on confirmation from our email service that the email has been successfully delivered.

Once delivered, you'll be able to see the Status change to either Delivered or Bounced. If you see an invoice with a status of Bounced, check the address; the most likely cause is that the email address doesn't exist. Then, the log will show you when the email has been Opened by its recipient and when the user has Clicked anything inside the email. Finally, once your client has paid the invoice electronically (or you record a payment in LeanLaw), the status will switch to Paid.

The Email Activity Log provides you a way to troubleshoot or monitor invoice delivery, helping you gain more control over your firm's revenue.

Custom Fields in invoice memos

Custom Fields have been released to all Pro firms. Custom Fields was created as an expansion of the QuickBooks Online feature by the same name. With this feature, rather than just being limited to QuickBooks' 3 fields, you can add as many as you like by inserting them into the 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.

More email delivery functions

Progress continues on our Invoice Email Delivery feature, currently in open beta. This feature allows firms to customize the emails sent to clients with a logo image and color theme, account summary information, Pay Invoice and Pay Balance buttons that link directly to a Gravity Legal payment portal, and more.

November's development focused on fixing issues, developing more support for account mapping and aggregate payments, and improving the appearance and clarity of the email settings page.


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.

November 28, 2022

  • Added a setting to the LEDES settings page that allows firms to control whether or not selecting a LEDES code automatically populates the Description field with that LEDES code. This has been a request from many firms who never used the preset LEDES descriptions, making them an inconvenience. Note: by default, LEDES codes will now not be added to descriptions.

  • Renamed the "Automatically Pay From Trust" setting to "Live Trust", removed the setting from the Invoice Email Delivery Page (it's now only in the Trust Accounting settings page) and added more details about the setting's function.

  • Fixed an issue where the custom checkbox wouldn't appear on time entries made in the Calendar page if the time entry was being viewed with "Advanced" enabled.

November 21, 2022

  • Fixed an issue where LEDES codes didn't appear on the New Expense modal unless you selected the matter first.

  • Fixed an issue where the Firm Share row wouldn't appear on the Payment Allocation modal if you had 0% firm share set at the firm level, but overrode your allocation settings elsewhere in a way that caused a payment to allocate money to the firm (such as by lowering an attorney's Working % at the user or the matter level)

November 20, 2022

  • Fixed some broken formatting in the Invoice Builder and the first page of step-by-step invoicing that was missed when updating to Tailwind.

November 18th 2022

  • Fixed an issue with ACH payments in our subscription page.

November 17, 2022

  • The Account Summary section of LeanLaw emails now adjusts the invoice total for taxes and discounts added to invoices in QuickBooks.

  • Fixed an issue where an atypical apostrophe symbol would be exported as strange characters. The fix for this is a language upgrade which should also add support for other odd characters.

  • Upgraded to Tailwind v3 and refactored several pages for it.

November 15, 2022

  • Released the Invoice Email Activity Log to all firms. This log allows any user with Firm Setup permissions to view the email status of any invoice sent via LeanLaw's email delivery service.

  • Fixed an issue where time entries could be paginated strangely on the Time Entries page, causing entries to appear out of order.

  • Fixed an issue where the Pay Balance button wouldn't appear on the email template preview if the firm had not changed their button background color.Fixed an issue that could cause payments to have a blank DistributionId value, which would cause errors when loading that payment.

  • Fixed an issue where LEDES codes couldn't be added to expenses in drafts if they didn't already have an expense code.

November 10, 2022

  • Cleaned up the Invoice Email Delivery settings page. The graphics for the Invoice and Trust Statement attachments now appear higher up on the demo email to give a better visual of what will be attached to your emails. We also removed the duplicate Trust Statement module, leftover from when we had a different design in mind.

  • Fixed an issue where Working % could not be overridden at the user level or matter level, in firms that have Firm Share as their calculated value.

November 9, 2022

  • Fixed an issue where write-downs could sometimes cause hours in Productivity reports and the Calendar page to round to 2 decimal places.

  • Increased the character limit for LEDES Matter Settings to 200 characters, and added a user-facing error to inform the user if they go over 200 characters. (Previously, we'd just throw a "Something went wrong" error.)

November 8, 2022

  • Added the ability to disable generalized LEDES codes in the LEDES Settings page. Generalized LEDES codes are those that often function as headers of more specific LEDES codes, like "A100 Activities." Many firms' can't send invoices which contain these generalized codes and have asked us to make it so their users can't select them by mistake.

  • Added support for attachments to our email service, and added the Trust Attachment setting, found in the Invoice Email Delivery setting page. While enabled, this will automatically attach a trust statement to every invoice with a trust balance as soon as it's sent to QuickBooks.

  • Fixed an issue where paralegals and timekeepers who had the Auto Assign Users to Matters permission could not use the Show Matters Involving filter for other users.

November 4, 2022

  • Added a setting to the LEDES page in Firm Settings that allows users to set general LEDES categories ("Activities", "Analysis & Strategy") as invalid for selection. This was requested by firms whose clients don't accept these categories.

  • Custom Fields have been released to all Pro firms. This feature allows firms to create custom fields at the client and matter level, assign values to them, and automatically input this data into every memo. This is great for clients who need specific case information, like "Patent: D8675309", attached to every invoice.

  • Fixed an issue where the Invoice Presentation setting that sets invoice dates to "Last Day of Billing Period" would not do as it says. This setting now correctly sets the Invoice Date to the last day in the Time Period filter at the time that the invoice was created.

  • Fixed an issue where the Total row could appear below the Firm row in payment allocation, giving it the misleading appearance that the total would include the firm share.

Looking for more changes? You can find last month's release notes here.

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