LeanLaw handles billing well and integrates smoothly with QuickBooks, but niche law firms usually need to add other tools. It lacks built-in expense tracking for personal injury cases and limited custom reporting. Pair it with Filevine for expenses and choose your three most critical QuickBooks fields carefully.
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Hi there, we're back again this week. And really I'm here to talk about some of the limits in niche law firms. So super niche down practices that you might find you're not going to get with LeanLaw or Clio software. So as far as modernization goes, I think that this is an area that adding other software on top of the billing software, if you look at LeanLaw just as billing software, you can add other pieces onto Track. And I mentioned that last week, that in the video, that if you are a personal injury firm and you need to track your client expenses, you might want to look at a Filevine or another product like that because it will be able to— it's specialized just for that type of practice area. Those are out there. Now, is it great connecting with QuickBooks? Absolutely not. So you might want to have LeanLaw, but also have the Filevine to track the client expenses. So you can kind of see where I'm going with when you have a specialized type of law firm. LeanLaw excels in a lot of ways with workflows. It's quick, it's easy, it's easy setup, easy learning for the, for the client, for the attorneys of the law firm that I can tell you for sure from my experience. It's been very simple. Most of my clients pick it right up how to use it, and it really focuses on billing. So It's a billing tool, and it works very well with QuickBooks if it's set up properly. And there's a lot of little pieces in there that if you learn the software, you're gonna learn ways to improve the workflow itself. Save time, save money. It's not less headaches for your client, your staff, for your clients as well. Lots of transparency, lots of flexibility. So you can add expenses or time in there, and you can pull it out and write it down. And there's a lot of things in there that you're able to do with LeanLaw, but you're still tracking the time. So if you have an attorney attorney there that is billing an excessive amount of time and then writing it off, you're going to see that. So I'm going to be able to track those metrics that sometimes you really can't see in other software. So knowing that that's there is important. Setting up and using class tracking is also— is critical, and you want to do that from the beginning. Classes work really well with LeanLaw. But if you start to use custom fields, remember, with QuickBooks, there's— even though they tell you you get 100 of them, there's really only 3 that are work— that are very powerful in reporting. So it's really critical you pick the top 3 and make that as a very wise choice because once you're committed, you get into that 4th one, your reporting is gonna be limited to just detailed reports, which is really a shortcoming on the QuickBooks side. KPIs and things of that nature. If you're tracking things like, uh, marketing KPI, you're not gonna get that outta LeanLaw. You're gonna get that outta QuickBooks. So it's powerful because it works with QuickBooks, which is a very robust system. But know that every detail that you need to run your firm and have it financially be a success works with the power of the two software together. So that's an important piece to remember when it comes to that, and especially when you're working in a niche area of law. It's important to understand how that works. It does work well. You can add users, you can add users into QuickBooks, and you can customize them. You're going to be in the advanced version of QuickBooks. So the more pricier one that they have, it's the second tier. They have Enterprise Suite now, which is the top tier. But know that you really want to make sure that it has all the pieces that you need. You really need to make a good evaluation before you sign up for any legal tech software. Don't always go by what the salesman tells you. They're just trying to make a sale. Talk to other people that use it. Talk to the bookkeeping firm and make sure it's not missing any features that you need in your firm. Those are the important pieces. Find out why it doesn't work. So if somebody comes to me and says, why don't you like XYZ software? I'm gonna tell them why. If I don't like it, what do I Where do I find, is it shortcoming? You know, I love that LeanLaw brings it all in the way I want to see it on the balance sheet with the sub-liability accounts. So that's a plus in my opinion because it gives me transparency in the trust account. Those are the things you want to know, how the product lays out the data. So questions you can ask for sure. So I hope this is helpful and we'll see you all next week. Bye now. Bye.
