Attorney Billing using LeanLaw

Hi there, Linda Ardisani, Ardisani Bookkeeping. So I'm in part 3 now of my series on if you just landed your first attorney client, how to work with them, how to know some of the things you need to know when you start to work with attorneys. First week we jumped into the terminology, the lingo, the language that they use. So you're aware of when you're speaking to the client exactly what they're talking about. Second week we jumped into the costs. So the expense side, the advanced client costs, the soft costs, the hard costs, got a little bit into trust accounting. This week we're going to jump into almost like wearing another hat. We're going to get into the actual apt lien law and how the attorneys would track their time or the timekeeper would track their time and how specifically that will tie into our part of the job of doing the billing. So let me share my screen. I'm going to take you through it and show you how it works. Here we are on the calendar view. And you can see here, this is the first window that pops up when you jump into LeanLaw. There's several ways you can add time. And as you can see here, they've already got the tasks set down here that you could, depending on the law firm type, you would preset this. And I probably should do a whole video on settings in LeanLaw because there's a lot of settings. that if they're set up properly, you're going to save yourself a lot of time. This is definitely one of them. And you could just click here on Tasks, click Manage, and you can add to them, right? So you can put a new task in here, whatever you want it to be, and hit Submit, and it's going to end up on your list. So it's pretty cool. Let's go back here to the time. So you can see here, I can have a timer on. I can start a timer very simply, new timer, and I can add a case to it. So I can pick an option. I can pick any of the matters that are attached to me. I'm just going to pick Let's pick— let's just pick Brenda. And she's got a couple of matters. I'm going to select Matter 17, and then I'm just going to go in here and just say client meeting to discuss the case. So these are items that you want to start to type in and put in there because you want them to show. And this can just be as you're sitting in the room with the client. This would be the attorney now sitting in the room with the client. You'd start the timer so you can get the discussion started, but you're also tracking the time because that's what lawyers do. They, they bill out on time. So that's one way you can actually adjust the time here if you need to set the time. So I'm going to get out of that. And I'm just going to delete it. So another way, I think this is the fun way. So I'm just going to select 3:36, right? And I'm just going to go grab it and I'm going to drag it. It's the fun way, right? I'm going to see that I'm going to— I've got a meeting here at this time. And I'm going to select a client, and I'm going to pick internal law expenses, and I'm just going to say I'm working on various research articles. This way it's in here, and it's got my 2.4 hours, and I just kind of grabbed out lots of matters. So I think I've got company meetings. It is— so you can have this set up. I'm going to put accounting. So save it. And now that's where my time is blocked off. So basically, you could fill your entire calendar this way and then track the entire day, even though this is an available event. At least this way shows what I was doing in that timeframe. So it's, it's a good way for the attorneys or the managing partner to see what the other partners are doing, or the other attorneys are doing, or the paralegals are doing, or any really anybody that's licensed in lien law. Another way you can do this is you can just do it by task. So maybe say that I'm doing a draft of one of my Matters. I can click on the draft. I can select my client. I can pick Brenda's Showroom again. It already says draft. I can pick the matter that it goes to. I'll pick Matter 17 once again, and I can put the end time down as 2:24 and then save it. So now that's going to be billed to the client when we do the workflow process of doing the billing. So that's basically it. It's very simple to do. You can go to time entries and actually right up here and add it from here. You can create an entry right here, and it's really simple to create the entry. And just— this is showing all the entries for this month. I can select the timekeeper as me and see the ones that are here, and I can create an entry from here. Pick a client, I can pick Mary Smith. Estate planning is our only matter, there's no other matters. You can see there's no dropdown. And then in here I could just put on, um, prepared copies for client. And then just like that, it's very simple. And then put the rate, my standard rate, $250 an hour, and the time it took me to do that, I'll put 1 hour and hit create the entry. So now that's in there. And that's also in the billable window. So now we did this last week, we've got into the expenses and started to go through and walk through all the expenses that the client may or may not have. Or if you remember, we can put in our soft costs here by selecting a client, Mary Smith. I can select from a template. Maybe there was some travel and I could put local travel, you know, 15 miles at whatever the rate is, you know, $1.56 a mile, however you want to work it. And then you can put the amount into the total and then just hit save. So you can do the math. So now it's billable now to Mary Smith for the local travel. So now we're going to get into billing. So with billing, it's pretty straightforward and simple. It's going to show all the people that have had time put on their matter, or maybe some costs put on their matter, whether they're soft costs or hard costs. They're going to show up here. And normally, typically when I work with a law firm, the list is really long. It could go on for a couple of pages. So you can select the matters individually. If somebody called up and said, hey, I need to get Mary Smith's invoice, you know, invoice out to her today, you can come right over here to create the draft, like one click. That's why the lightning bolt. You can go over here and create the draft as well, just with hitting the arrow. I usually do it this way. I usually come in and select them all, and then I can come over here to hit and create the drafts, and that's going to put them all into draft. So remember, these are not going to go into QuickBooks at all. They're not— they're not posting into QuickBooks. They're just in LeanLaw, but they're there for the attorneys to approve. So the attorney can come in here and say, well, maybe I don't want to approve Abram, but I want to approve Mary Smith and I don't want this one to go out just yet, and maybe this, this one, and I'll just leave Abrams here. And then from there, I'm just going to approve them. So as you can see, Abrams is going to be the only one still staying in this draft window until it's ready to be billed. Maybe there's a reason why. And if there's something added to Abrams, you will be able to go in and undo these matters and put them ready to bill again. So now we're going to approved. And now this is where the attorney would say, hey, Linda, ready to bill these, send them out. And they're ready to go. So what I would do here is I would come into the approved, I would select them all, I would submit them to QuickBooks because they've already reviewed them and submit them and let them go. They're all dated 8/31. Let's hop into QuickBooks here. So obviously with QuickBooks, I can always come over here and see the last few invoices that were created. They're right here if I needed to access one of the ones I did. But the best way to send these out, if you have a large list of them, Sometimes the list will show that some need to be emailed. Maybe you've got the email for your client. Some might need to be snail mailed or printed. So the easiest way I find to do that is to come over to the Sales tab. And then just filter down this list. So I would filter this down. You could obviously click this. Normally wouldn't see a 2020 date. You could come over here and just filter it. I want to not see all the transactions, just want to see the invoices, and then status would be open. And then the due date would be the date. I know it's 8/31, so I'm just going to do 8/31. I'm going to make sure this is '19 and not '18, and then also 8/31 here. And hit Apply, and then the list will be here. Normally, like I said, I'd have a list that would go on a couple of pages. So one of the things I did was I added this email column. So if these— any of these customers had an email, I would be able to sort by this because you see the little arrow there, you can sort. And I would sort it by email status. And then you can— I'm not sure if you can filter that. It doesn't look like you have that. Yeah, filter. You could filter by any status. You could do print later or send later. So you can filter it by send later. And then it would just show the ones that need to be sent, then you can batch send them. See, you always can find things in QuickBooks that you didn't know were there. Normally, I would just sort the list and then just grab them. So you can sort the list right down to exactly what you're looking for. And then you can send those out very simply. You're going to select them. If these were the email ones, I'd select them and send them, but I can also go back to Actions and just print. Once you hit Print, you're going to get a PDF, and I print them to PDF and I email them. But if you weren't going to PDF them over to them, you could leave them in here and have the attorney do this piece of it and send them out from their law firm, especially if it's coming to print. I usually print them to PDF and let— just send them to the admin and they print them right there from the The PDF so they don't have to— I don't want anybody really having access to QuickBooks. So once you get out of the print window, you're going to come up here and say, is this what you— do you want to have these marked printed? You say yes. Now that says printed. So you know that if you had to go back into any of these invoices, you're going to be able to see— and this isn't an invoice, but it's an internal one. This shouldn't have been billed. But if you can see here that— So let's just select one of these invoices. And then I should be able to go into my details to see that this was printed. If I hit More and then Audit History, it's going to tell me that this is the history on the invoice. If I show all, you're going to be able to see that this was printed somewhere in here. It's not sent. It says printed right there. So you can see that it was printed. So it's as easy as that to produce an invoice in LeanLaw and to track the time and to collect the cost, put it all together. And it's that simple to do the billing. I can't express that enough. It's so easy. It's easy. I've never had to really jump back in to explain to a client how to, how to go in and use LeanLaw. It's very simple. They usually can figure it out because it's, it's, it's just set up intuitively. And that's what I love about the product, which is why you hear me talk about it so much. So I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions, comments, please feel free to reach out. And I hope you have a wonderful day. Bye now.