Linda Artesani walks through LeanLaw's calendar tool for time tracking in law firms. You can log billable and non-billable hours, use a timer for real-time tracking, and set multiple billing rates. It syncs with QuickBooks for accounting and reporting, though it lacks case linking and intake forms that full practice-management software offers.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. Now we're going to dive right back into LeanLaw. I'm taking every week and working in just little snippets of where you might— maybe parts of LeanLaw you don't know or don't understand or maybe didn't even realize existed. And really last week we dove into some shortcuts. So we looked at text snippets, ways that you can streamline the workflow, create very similar language that can be modified so that when you do track the time, you're able to use those shortcuts. And very much like TextExpander, that's another app that does that same thing for Word and all that. But this is for specifically in LeanLaw, which is really cool. It's a nice little, nice little piece of LeanLaw that I think is really helpful. We did expense templates as well, which was shorter ways to kind of enter your soft costs and not have to keep typing the same words over and over again, saving you some time. This week we're going to dive into the calendar, take a look at it. It's not as robust a calendar. It's not a practice management software. So it's not a robust calendar like you would expect to see in a practice management type of software, but it also doesn't come with that price tag. So it's specific to using it to— using the product to track time and bill for time. Unfortunately, attorneys still do that kind of work. They bill for time. And it's a way to track time in the increments that attorneys like to use, that 1/6 of an hour. And also track what you're doing. So you— the attorneys and the timekeepers and the paralegals, they live in this part of LeanLaw. So I just want to take a few minutes here just to talk about the calendar, show you the different views, show you some of the functionality, and then we'll move on to another piece of LeanLaw next week. So let me share my screen. So here we are in LeanLaw. You can see we're on the calendar view, right? You've got the toolbar at the top, you're on the calendar view. And we have a couple of ways that we can actually show this particular screen here where you can see that we've got a couple of views. So we've got the view that you're looking at now, which is the calendar on the left, and it's got the time. So I can actually book in some time here and just click anywhere on the calendar and type in maybe something that you already had happen in your day and you want to go back in and put the time in. You can add your appointment appointments as well, things in the future that you haven't had happen. You can select your timekeeper here. So we've got some names here. You can add your description. If you want to use your snippets, you can come over here, which we talked about, you know, last week with the snippets. Is it billable time? Is it not billable time? You can put the hours in here, billable or not billable. Say you're doing tracking some time that you used on marketing. So it's not really billable, but you want to track the time, you want to track your entire day, you've got the ability to do that. You can put your start time in and your end time in. So it's just a simple way to track time in LeanLaw. You can switch it over to advanced and you can start to pull in your rates. I only have hourly rate for me here, but if you had multiple rates— and a lot of the attorneys I work with, they have multiple rates that they use for maybe different parts of their practice— they can put that in as well. They can change the amount, they can put the default in, they can change the amount here. So that's just one section. You can actually go and change your calendar view to the week. I kind of like this one because you can work through— it's on Tuesday that I'm taping this, so you can see the week from Tuesday to Tuesday. So I can see my week at a glance and see what my appointments are, see what I'm looking at, what do I have happening in my day or my week, and be able to really track where it is. This is a great view for the admin staff. You got an admin that takes care of your day. They can book your calendar. They can see the whole thing at a glance. You can also go up to time entries and see the entries that you've already put in here. I don't have any in here at the moment. I might be able to do all dates and we'll be able to see a bit more. I might have some more in here. Nope, I don't. If I change this to any timekeeper, you can see here that there's timer and time entries in here. So I just took it off the filter for me, but you can filter the time entries. Back to the calendar. So you have the ability to do that here. You've got your snippets, you can start the timer. So if you had an appointment on the calendar, you weren't sure how long it was going to take. You want to make sure you've booked it in and you want to make sure that you get the timer started. So maybe you expected an hour appointment, but it ended up being perhaps a 2-hour appointment or a 3-hour appointment. Sometimes if you're an estate planning attorney, I know when I visited my attorney, I've had that happen where we're booked in for an hour and it gets to be like a bigger event where we're going into diving into areas that I didn't expect to happen, then you blocked off that time in your calendar. You start the timer, you can end the timer, you can manage your calendar by clicking Manage here, and that will help you come back to your settings. So this is where you can add more text snippets. So that I can refer you back to in the earlier video that will take you in and show you what snippets, and I give you some tips on how to do that. So basically, that's the calendar. There's not a lot here. There's not any way to kind of link back to case management. There's no intake form, things that you would find more likely in a practice management type software. This is a time and billing software with a lot of perks. I like to call it the time and billing software on steroids because there's so much in LeanLaw. When we start to get into reports, you're going to see the fabulous reports. You're going to get into the estate— I'm sorry, not the estate, but the trust accounting and how robust and how strong a feature this is. Remember, the best part of LeanLaw for me is the fact that it connects to QuickBooks. So this is not your typical law firm software that's created by an attorney, and the attorney doesn't really know accounting. So they created an attorney-specific software, and then they go, oh, I think I should add accounting to it. And then they throw an accounting piece in that's really weak. No, this software, yes, it was developed and created by an attorney, Gary Allen, wonderful guy. He's still, you know, involved, very much involved in here. But the team behind LeanLaw is fabulous. And the best part is because it's a connection to QuickBooks, and it's a really great strong connection with QuickBooks with a 2-way sync, you're able to get the functionality of a full-blown accounting program with great attorney-specific tracking of time, reporting. I can't say enough about the product, which is why I didn't really do a review of it when I did my reviews of software, because comparing this to all the others, it's just hands down fabulous compared to the other software. They just— none of them do what LeanLaw and the power behind LeanLaw and QuickBooks. So on that note, I hope you'll have a wonderful week, and I'll see you next week for more diving into LeanLaw. Bye now.
