What’s new in LeanLaw this month?
Email reminders
An unfortunate truth of billing is that, sometimes, clients need to be reminded of their outstanding invoices. To facilitate this, we've added the ability to send reminders from the Track Sent Invoices page, which is found in the Billing tab.
To send a reminder, simply select the invoice(s) you wish to send reminders for, and click the green Send Reminder button.
If it's the first time your firm is sending a reminder, you'll automatically be asked to configure your reminder template. However, if you wish to view or edit your reminder template, you can find it in your Firm Settings ⚙️ under Email Settings. And for more information on our Email Settings page, check out this article!
More time increment options
For years, LeanLaw has allowed users to track time in two incremental options: .1 hour (6 minute increments) and .25 hour (15 minute increments). However, some firms have other incremental agreements with their clients, and different timekeeping needs from their software. For these firms, we've added .01 hour (36 second increments) and .5 hour (30 minute) increments.
To change your firm's timekeeping increments, navigate to the Firm Settings page by clicking the gear ⚙️ in the top right of any LeanLaw page, select Firm Info from the left sidebar, and select your Default Time Entry Increment.
Remember to enable Enforced Rounding if you want to make it so that your timekeepers can only create time entries according to your desired increment! For more information, check out this article.
Internal notes
Internal notes is now released to all users. Have you ever wanted to make notes on a time entry? Perhaps you have a comment you'd like to leave for someone else in the firm. Perhaps you want to leave yourself a reminder regarding a time entry. There's now a space to do this on time entries!
As a note on visibility: internal notes will never appear on an invoice and are visible to anyone in the firm with permission to view the time entry.
Copy Payment Link
Have you ever had a client on the phone with their credit card at the ready to pay off an invoice, and wanted an easy way to take their payment? You can now copy an invoice's payment link to your clipboard from the Manage Invoices page through the triple dot menu to the right of the invoice! If the invoice doesn't yet have a payment link created, it will create it on the spot!
Update history
As always, we’ve also been hard at work to squash bugs and improve the user experience. Here are the patch notes for our development.
October 31, 2023
Fixed an issue where the totals listed at the bottom of the Manage Invoices page weren't being updated by changes to the filters for With/Without Trust or Unpaid, Overdue, and Paid.
Fixed an issue where the word "false" was appearing at the end of the Edit Trust Account modal.
October 30, 2023
Fixed an issue where the Track Sent Invoices page would fail to load data in firms with more than 2100 matters.
October 27, 2023
Fixed an issue that prevented users from logging in with their Microsoft 365 account.
Fixed an issue that could cause client or matter pages to fail to load if they had been recently modified by a user who had been deleted from the firm.
October 26, 2023
Fixed an issue where the title of the Track Sent Invoices page had disappeared.
Fixed an issue on the pop-up for setting up email reminders for the first time on the Track Sent Invoices page, where selecting a Subject would cause the modal to be finalized and close.
October 25, 2023
Email Reminders are now here! To send an email reminder, visit the Track Sent Invoices tab (found in the Billing page) to view your sent emails and click the checkmark next to any invoices for which you wish to send a reminder. Then, click the Send Reminder button. A reminder email will be sent to all of the addresses used on the original invoice, using your Email Reminder template, and all of the attachments from the original email.
Email Reminder templates can now be configured in the Email Settings page of your Firm Settings. You can set a custom email subject and text for your email reminders.
Fixed an issue on the client-level Billing Activity page where the Include Trust checkbox could cause a silent error in rare cases.
Fixed an issue where canceling changes on the Email Settings page could cause the Subject field to appear blank and cause the Save Changes and Cancel buttons to persist.
October 21, 2023
The Track Sent Invoices page now has filters that allow users to view emails sent by period, client, matter, user involvement, and payment status. This feature is available to all firms who use LeanLaw's email service.
October 18, 2023
Fixed an issue where firms that had never before synced an expense from QuickBooks were suddenly unable to do so.
Fixed an issue where renaming your trust bank account in QuickBooks would not be reflected in LeanLaw, which could cause errors when attempting to send a trust request.
Fixed several small graphical issues on the Time Entries page.
October 17, 2023
Added the ability to Copy Payment Link. This option is accessible in the triple dot menu of invoices that have reached the Manage Invoices page in firms with Gravity Legal enabled. When clicked, the invoice's payment link will be copied to the user's clipboard, allowing another way to create Gravity Legal payment links for invoices.
Improved the performance of Client and Matter dropdowns.
Fixed an issue where our new Draft printing method wouldn't work in firms that weren't connected to QuickBooks Online.
Fixed an issue where lacking the "Time For Others" user permission would lock the Assigned To dropdown on the Expenses page.
October 13, 2023
Added the Rate Group column to the Matter Activity report. This column will only show up in firms with at least 1 rate group, and allows firm operators to easily validate rate groups across all matters.
Revised the text in the Conflict Check page to be less ambiguous about what it checks. Users are now given a link to our support documentation to learn exactly what values our conflict check searches, and how to use the feature.
October 12, 2023
When creating a new matter for an existing client, Copy Billing and Rate Info will now include the rate group of your most recently edited matter, if the matter had a rate group.
October 11, 2023
Fixed an issue where the "Write down to zero" option in draft invoices didn't mark time entries as a write-down in the productivity report.
Fixed an issue where clients and matters with special characters could trigger a QuickBooks error when LeanLaw tries to create the customer or subcustomer in QuickBooks.
Fixed an issue in the Billable by User report where the Total column wouldn't always populate.
Fixed an issue that prevented the custom field report from loading any data.
Fixed an issue where the text "Are you sure you want to delete this dashboard?" could be cut off on screens with low resolution.
October 10, 2023
Removed the Internal Notes setting flipper and made Internal Notes standard on all time entries.
Fixed an issue where the Matter Rates report didn't always reflect a matter's correct rates if the matter had a rate group applied to it.
Fixed an issue where firms couldn't change originators on a matter after applying a rate group to the matter.
Fixed an issue where paying an invoice from trust would reduce the balance due on a payment link.
Fixed an "intermediate value" error that could occur on the Advanced Report tab.
October 5, 2023
Added .01 and .5 time increment options to the Firm Info page.
Polished the styling of the product on many buttons and borders in the Clients and Matters pages.
Fixed an issue where the setting "No Payment Links in Memo" would not appear to be checked in firms that had never toggled the setting before. This setting was intentionally set to enabled by default, but wasn't appearing so in some firms.
Fixed an issue where some settings pages (User Permissions, LEDES, Billing, and My Info) wouldn't trigger a refresh of the user's cached settings when settings were saved. This would cause these pages to appear as if no changes had been saved if the user left the page and came back without refreshing their page.
October 1, 2023
Fixed an issue where users in the Accountant role could be assigned to time entries and expenses.
Looking for more changes? You can find last month's release notes here.