LEAN, Mean, LAW Machine!

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. We've been working on Your First Attorney Client series, and this week is supposed to be all about pricing, but as they say, life got in the way, and this week I am really overloaded, fortunately with new clients, but also getting prepared for Scaling New Heights. So that's the only accounting conference this year, And it is going to be held in Florida in November, and I'm just trying to get ready for it. Got several PowerPoints I have to work on and deadlines I have to meet. So I decided to just take a little journey into LeanLaw, doing a short, pretty high-level overview of the platform. A, because I'm trying to put an ebook together for attorneys so they have a way to know all the features of LeanLaw and how it works with QuickBooks, and also Just, I think it's a great video to have because I'm always promoting it. I love it. I'm going to be on the Lawyerist podcast coming up very soon in October, and I'm going to be talking about LeanLaw. And I want to just give you all that high-level overview so that it's available on the website. So that being said, phew, let's go into LeanLaw. Here we are inside of LeanLaw. This is the screen. If you're an attorney, this is the screen that's going to pop up on you, on your screen, the first thing. This is what you want as your default. Now, you have the ability to change your default to a different window if you're an accountant. I just like mine is always directly going to the billing tab, but for the attorneys, this is where you're going to live. As you can see here, we've got a couple of views. This is the week view, and you can see I've blocked off some time for matters, and I've actually worked on already 5.5 hours today. This is a meeting for tomorrow. You can block off times and put your schedule in. It's just a great tool for time and billing because you won't miss a minute of the time that's supposed to be billed because you've got this. Lots of times attorneys, they don't want to pay for an app for this, but it's well worth it. It will pay for itself in just one not-missed piece of time not billed, right? So as we come over to the calendar, and I'll just show you, I'm gonna move it over to this other view here. As we come over to the calendar, you can see with the calendar view that that I've got the timekeeper here, which you can select from a hierarchical view. And I've got names in here because some people have been invited in here. I don't want to expose all the names that are in my file, but in here you can drop down and just select a different attorney or a timekeeper that will take it. This is Snippets. Snippets is really cool. So you can manage your snippets and it'll ping you back to Settings, and I'll get to Settings in a moment. But Snippets is a nice little way to save time. So if anybody has ever used TextExpander, which is a great little app that you can purchase that helps you If you're typing a lot of documents, it'll help you shorten documents and words you use over and over and over again, you'll be able to collect and use and keep them in little segments. And I like making them shorter instead of big long sentences so they're more versatile as you do the billing. And I'll show you how that works as well. So let's make an appointment for— say I forgot to put in an appointment time here. I'm going to select Timer Entry because I'm pulling that right off. I'm the timekeeper, but I can also be the attorney. And then I can pick my client. We'll pick Matthew here and his arrest. And then I can just put in some time. So I can grab a snippet. Let's grab a snippet. It was a legal filing. And then I can type in the rest of the words here. And it took me— let's just say it took me half an hour to do that. And it is billable. And I just have to put this in here. So it's billable. It was half an hour and hit save. Or I can put the start time and the end time. So now that's billable time towards his matter, right? So now I've got it in here. When I go over to do my billing, I will show you. So this is— the attorney will live in this piece and they'll live in the billing. If you do the draft and approval stage, the attorney would live in this part as well. So the draft and approval section would be where the attorney would come and approve after I've moved it over from ready to bill. So ready to bill is here. If you're an attorney who works from this piece, you'll see that this will be— if you're doing your own billing, you'd have your ready to bill, you'd have your drafts, and your approved. Because I backdated it, let's go here. I don't want the responsible attorney button on here. You'll see now that I've exposed the extra pieces, and here's Matthew Fulton's arrest. So if I were going to bill out of lien law, I would click this. It was a lot of bills. I spent 5 hours with him, and we had some expenses in here. Expenses from this Expense tab— this will expose what expenses are booked to the matters. And I can actually see here that Matthew had some postage that I had to bill him for. So that's a soft cost, and you can add them by just clicking on the plus sign. You can add a new expense, you can add a client, add a matter. This is very similar to QuickBooks with the plus sign and the gear for the settings. So That's something to know as you start to work in the program. It's not like you're spending a lot of time figuring out how to use this. It's very logical in the way this is all laid out. Obviously, if you're looking for a matter, if I'm looking for a specific matter, I can type in here Seth and Seth's matter will come up. I can click on it and that will expose the bigger window where I can put my practice area in. Maybe I'm doing estate planning or general business for Seth. I have 2 custom fields. Now, custom fields is an awesome part of this platform. A lot of times I use the custom fields for the matter ID, matter name. Originating attorney is another one that I use. So these are things that you're gonna be able to pull from. I can add originating attorney here, and I can pick an originator here by selecting off of a list. And of course, my list has some strange names on it. I've kind of taken some TV lawyers' names in here too as well. So I could say that the originating attorney was— let's see, I'll do Jonathan. So now Jonathan's the originator. I can have The ability to track the originator and the responsible opposing counsel's in here too, adverse parties. So you've got lots of things you can put in here. You can do a conflict check. You can put your billing rates. So Jonathan didn't have a rate, so I can actually select one for him and give him a rate. He's, you know, ooh, he's that, really that expensive? Here we go. And I can just save my changes so I can update my entries. And now I can come into the fixed fees. So a lot of attorneys like to use fixed fees now. I've had a couple Recently, which I think is amazing, fixed fee billing, from an accountant's perspective, we did hourly for a bazillion years, and we've now started to move our way towards fixed fee billing as well. Most of the accounting industry has embraced it as far as the bookkeeping side. It has really been very beneficial. If you can figure out what's the best amount to bill for a specific service that you sell, that you do repeatedly, And that's make it a profitable amount, it's great for the client too, 'cause then they now know what they have to pay and it's not like, God, I wanna get off the phone with my attorney because he's charging me and, you know, why are they talking about yoga when I know I'm being charged by the minute? So this is why a lot of attorneys are now starting to move towards that. The other reason, of course, is you've got how many hours in the day that you can actually bill a client? This will help you just increase your revenue. So something we recommend. In fact, part of one of the things from the Lawyerist podcast, if you listen to that one, they're really proponents of that as well. Here's where you would attach your account to QuickBooks, which is pretty cool. He has an IOLTA balance, so he has money inside of the trust accounting, which is nice. It's done by the matter, so he's billed by the matter, but you can switch it to client accounting if you want and just switch it. I'm not going to change that here. But that's your option. You can bill by the client or bill by the matter. If you have leads billing, you can do leads billing here and just enable it by the matter, or you can just do it on the backend once we get to the invoicing period part of it. And then of course, the client, you can put all the information in which you don't have any information in here because it's a test file, but you do have the ability to do that there as well. Now let me take off the attorney's suit, so to speak, and go right into the accountant or bookkeeper's view. So, as an accountant or bookkeeper, you are going to go to Settings and set up your file. Now, I work with a lot of law firms and we work hand in hand. We are finding that a lot of the law firms will work with a client— will work— the law firm admin is actually wearing the bookkeeper role and they're really happy when we come in, we do a migration, we bring them to the cloud, and then we end up working with them to help them migrate through all of the details like the trust accounting. It's hard sometimes because they're pulled in 8,000 directions where we have the ability to put that lens on of just focusing on that. So we do have that as a service that we sell. This is also a nice feature because I can have the accounting side which has my firms, and if I click that, you'd see all my companies that I work with. So I'm not going to click that button, but it's just like QuickBooks. It would be listed down. As a person coming in working hand in hand in tandem with us, what we do is we invite them as a client and they would have the operator view. Same feature set that we have. They can change settings. They have quite the ability to do a lot of things. We would still stay in the accountant seat. So I love the fact that LeanLaw gives us the accountant seat and we're not like sharing a login, which is nice because then there's a way to track who did what. So as we come in here, if you were the operator, you would have Text snippets. This is where you can come in and actually create your own snippets right in here, and you can just start to type them and put them in. Practice area here as well. So you can come into the practice area and set your practice areas. We can create a practice area in here. Um, I could create multiple practice areas. So you can create areas like, uh, real estate, business litigation, family law. We've got a few here, as you can see. Like I said, text snippets, you can come into text snippets and just wait for it to flow here. I don't know why I'm— maybe my internet is slow today. As we click into text snippets, you can see that I've made a few. Like I said, it's better to have a few shorter ones so you can just kind of shorten what you have to type and make it work. If you have verbiage that you use all the time that fits for your firm, I would highly recommend, you know, if you want to extend it. But for me, I'm finding with a lot of the firms, it's easier just to do little small words and then, you know, meeting with client to discuss, or meeting with, and then you can add their name. Practice area is another place that you can put your practice area and start to track income or revenue by the practice area. And it's in LeanLaw that this is tracked. The custom fields is starting to come around, and we're going to start to be able to push— when the API is open, we're going to be able to push out of LeanLaw into QuickBooks that piece of it. For now, if we set you up and you want to track by attorney, We are tracking that under the class coding in QuickBooks. Fixed fee templates— this is a great place to just create your own fixed fee template. Like this one is for estate planning, an initial draft or will, you know, a draft with estate planning, which didn't spell that right. But you can see that maybe I have a package or something that I can sell to somebody for $575. So that's there. And if you have multiple little pieces that you sell with fixed fees, you can create fixed fee invoices right from this perspective, from this place, and it makes the workflow smoother. Expense templates, same thing. If this is for your soft costs, so we charge $5 a fax. File fee is not typically a soft cost, but maybe it is in your firm. Postage, so you can just sell the postage back. This is where you would show the firm info, and this is my fake company, so this is the you know, the demo file for QuickBooks Advanced. It's a law firm. You can have a couple of choices here of what your firm can be. Here's where you can create your own, um, your own, uh, custom fields that you want to track. So if you're coming off of another software and there was something you're really attached to inside of that software, you can create a custom field to track that here. We also have the ability to track custom fields in QuickBooks. We have big custom fields, which is great. We can tailor the program to work for you. So that's another consideration when you're looking at QuickBooks Online Advanced. It's the only SKU, the only product line that has that capability to really customize with, with the custom fields feature. Subscription would take you to the type of subscription. I actually have this as a demo file, so it's a non-billed one, but there are 2 different types of subscriptions with LeanLaw. If you were going to go with them. They have a Core one which is lesser priced, and it's really for the smaller, the micro firms, but you lose some of the reporting and some of the features that you may need for your firm. I just try to encourage people, like with QuickBooks, go to the Advanced product because of all the things that are inside of it, all the features that are baked in. Same thing with LeanLaw. If you really want to have LeanLaw and be able to use it to the best of capability that's there, just, just pay for the higher-priced one. Unless you're a really small firm, it's really worth having the higher-tiered product. This is where you would connect your QuickBooks file. This is also where you would connect your operating account. You can see we've already done that. The expense settings in here is just basically where you would connect— what's the name of your advanced client cost account? It happens to be Advanced Client Cost in this particular file. The billable expense was named by somebody who was in the file naturalization. They actually renamed my chart of accounts. So I would go back in and just call it billable expense income. And this is just where you set those config— the configuration is where the 2 products talk to one another. So you want to make sure that you get the right accounts because that's where the information is going to go in the 2-way sync. Matters billed marked with parent is something that you may or may not want to have on, and that will have a lot to do with the hierarchical view of Customer, and then the sub-level would be the matter is is the sub-customer in QuickBooks. Create a client matter right away in QuickBooks. I love this because it's easier and a better workflow if you do it from Lean Law to QuickBooks. That way, we're not mistyping a name like Linda with a Y, Linda with an I, and then trying to connect them, and then you end up with multiple multiple names, which is where you get into problems with Iolta coming. How did somebody say this week? Horizontal. It just became a mess. So it's— if you do it this way, you create everything through LeanLaw— the customer, the matter— and then it pushes into QuickBooks. So the information is fed back down. It's really good that way. It keeps it clean, and that's what we like to see. Invoice payment methods, you can select here to add the credit card or the ACH. We always recommend using Intuit Merchant Services if it's straight-up AR, and we do recommend LawPay. Lain Law is going to be integrating with Gravity Payments, and I would just say do that on the trust side and stick to the QuickBooks side for the rest. That's my recommendation, only because of the automation piece. It's really sweet automation when you hook up the Intuit Merchant Services, and I can help you with that if you want to set up class tracking. And again, that's where we talked a little bit about setting that up by the law, by the attorney. So if we have 3 partners and we want to track who's bringing in what revenue, we would set it up here, and then we'd also set the classes up inside of QuickBooks. So each class is each attorney. So we're not only tracking the revenue side up here in LeanLaw, but we're able to track down in QuickBooks the revenue side and any expenses or overhead or anything else that we want to track specifically there. Now LeanLaw does have— and I'll get down here for a bit here— so that's how you connect that piece. So the trust accounting page is really where you can really fine-tune customization, connect your trust account. Again, you can connect your operating here if you didn't do so already. You can use an undeposited fund account in QuickBooks. That's just— I like to call it the desk drawer, where if you were throwing all the checks in during the week and then you were Taken to the bank on Friday. Now you can collectively put the pile and just have the deposit be the total of however many checks you put together. Most of the time, because a lot of people are just snapshotting checks on their banking app and they're going in singularly, I won't even use undeposited funds. I'll have it go directly to the bank. Saves a step. You don't have to do the bank deposit. It all depends on the workflow for the firm. That's where you'd probably want to have the help from a trusted advisor to help you with the setup of these features. Trust notice invoice, trust notice important. You can modify it, you can make it be what you want it to be. You can edit it, you can use these fields to edit it. So then the data will point to the fields. Same thing with the full payment notice. And then we also have a partial payment notice. You can see the partial payment notice. So really customizable to the firm. There is evergreen invoicing in here. It's a feature you'd have to have them turn on at LeanLaw. The folks at LeanLaw will turn that on for you. Billing workflow is important. Like I mentioned earlier, there's bank— there's a billing tab, and you can expose in the billing tab. You're a solo, you could just look at the billing, create the bill, goes right to QuickBooks. If you are working with somebody else like my firm, you might want to have the billing tab have the approval— have the approval stage, have the draft stage, the pre-bill. So billing, I would put— I would click in there, create a pre-bill, you'd approve the pre-bill, and then I would push it into QuickBooks. So there's lots of controls in place to make sure that the billing happens in the right manner. Leads billing is really cool. One thing to note about leads billing, and if you're familiar with it, you know that if you want it turned on, you know exactly the code sets that you need. LeanLaw is— what I like about it is it makes this really easy. And I've had some clients come off of products like Juris where it's quite complex and a lot of work. And sometimes people come to me just for this feature. That they want to learn LeanLaw. One thing to note, you have to— you can't just go create a bill and then— you have to push it into QuickBooks and then do the Leads Billing. If you don't, it doesn't work. Invoice Presentation. This is where you can customize your invoice to look the way you like it. So if you just kind of look here as I click different boxes, include the username and description. Now you see the username is PP, so it's PPML's initials. I can take that off in the words. So you can really play around with the buttons Combine billable and non-billable so it's all together, or you can take that off. Timekeeper detail in the memo, or timekeeper detail as an attachment. I prefer the memo. I think it's nice to have so they can know the hourly rates. But if you're doing hourly billing, it's kind of nice. Custom fields. Here's where I use— these are the two that I always seem to use when it comes to working with the mid-market firms. They all want the matter name and the originating attorney on here, but you can Again, customizable. You pick, you create your custom field in QuickBooks, you create it here in LeanLaw, you marry the 2 together. Very simple. Report preferences are here. Who can see a report? Client and matter IDs. It's important, right? You want to have the client matter ID, and you want it to be— you can set it up to be manually generated, you can set it up to be numerical, year plus the numerical year plus the numerical matter. I like using the year plus because I like to know if it says 2020, that it goes to 2020. As we get into the reporting here, there's a different variety of reports that you can have to select. We have the Billable by Client and Matter. So there's a lot of reports in there. You can filter these down. So this month might not be good, but I could do, let's see, last year maybe. Let's see what we got. And then maybe I want to take my name off and show Matter users for all. And let's see as this populates. So I got a lot of data in here, and it's pulling right from QuickBooks and the program. So you can see, here is the hours non-billable, hours billable, hours total, fixed fee, the expenses. We have a lot of really cool reports inside of LeanLaw. I'm just going to go back here by one little click, and then I can start to go by practice area. I don't know if I've set up any data by practice area at all. I guess I have. Oh no, either no practice area or general business. So anything you have coded towards the practice area, just make it a point to make sure you add that in. You can add archive or include it or only, depending on what you're looking for with the reporting. Let's see what else we have. Just really high level here. Billable by user, ready to bill, the WIP report. This is kind of an important one. This is one where we can track what's not been billed. And when you work with a lot of firms, especially mid-market, The partners want to stay on this because they want to make sure the attorneys are doing the billing. And this is a great report for this. It'll show the hours ready to be billed, the expenses, the fixed fees, receivables balance. This is a great place to check on your receivables, who hasn't paid you. Now, when you get into QuickBooks Online Advanced, which is a whole nother video, right? Then there's automated workflows inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced to start to track these receivables that are falling behind. There's like an extra layer there that you can automate, which is really wonderful. You can see here I've got a big invoice I need to get out to Coastal Motors. You can see the trust balances here, so it's really right there. And the attorneys can see, as you invite them in, they can see what you want the attorneys to see, just their view. They would have the view of only their invoicing, only what's owed to them, only what's in their trust accounts and their clients. Which is really one of the great features of LeanLaw. Let me go back here. Revenue by Attorney, Revenue by Client and Matter, another good report to have. Shows who's the responsible on here. Billed Hours, Expensed Hours, Billed Fees, Billed Total, Collected Trust. You can see here that there's quite a few things here. Receivables Balance. It's nice to be able to follow all of that in one report. Revenue by attorney. You can see which attorney is doing better than the other. Attorneys love to do that. Allocation detail. And you can get really into, like, if it's a rev-share kind of thing going on where you've got the originating and the responsible and the originating, you can start to really go through. And that's something you'd filter down, some feature. It's a feature set you need to have turned on if you have that kind of situation going on in your office. That's a good feature, and it's really cool because it does a lot of that calculating for you. It's a fairly new feature. Revenue by Originating Attorney. So you can see how much was billed by Jonathan, how much was collected, collected expenses. So that's something that's important as you get into some of those compensation reports and reporting. We have a Receivables Report. That's fairly new as well. I like this because it gives you that view, Especially because a lot of times we don't want the attorneys in our QuickBooks. We want them to be able to see where their receivables are. So this is a big ask and they've delivered. This, this is a good thing about LeanLaw. We have a pretty tight relationship with them and they've really been evolving rather quickly and really adapting to a lot of our needs, which has been wonderful. And then you can get into the trust report. Important report to check on if you're doing this kind of work. And it shows you the client who's responsible, what the trust balance is, what the WIP is. Whether it's been billed in full, if there is still some work to be done. We have the fixed fee profitability report. I'm not going to go into every report here. Timekeeper productivity, matter rates, matter activity, client information. So I think we got through it all, which is pretty cool. So that's it in a nutshell. That is LeanLaw at the higher level view. I hope this is a helpful video for you to know and get a little sampling or taste of lien law. We have a demo file. We let people come in and play around in it. So if you are interested in doing that, let us know. We would love to have you in and have a conversation if it would fit and work in your firm, which 90% of our clients are in lien law. We've got another 10% that really want Clio because they want that practice management software. If you are a firm that wants that but also wants lien law, there are workarounds for that. So you don't have to go to Clio, although Clio is a pretty cool product too. Those are really the 2 that we would recommend. I personally think LeanLaw trumps Clio any day. Clio is good, but it's not as good with— Clio is great with— if you combine it with Xero. QuickBooks and LeanLaw are just that match made in heaven. So on that note, if you are an attorney and you have messy books, please reach out. We love to fix them, and we love to fix messy IOLTA or trust accounts. We are experts in that, and we're experts in lien law, and we're experts in migration. If you're an accountant, a bookkeeper, and you want some more help, I'm here to help. And we have a Facebook group called QB Community Live. Love to have you join and join in on the fun there too. So I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day. Bye now.