LeanLaw Settings Team Settings

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. We're continuing on with the settings in LeanLaw and really setting everything up, and we're going to get into some cool stuff, some ways to save your firm time, especially when it comes to billing. So we're going to get into some team settings that might take a little bit of effort on your part to set it up, put the thinking cap on, look at invoices to see where your repetitive language comes from and maybe how you can How you can set that up to be successful, to set up a bit of snippets and some shortcodes to really help speed through doing the billing, right? And billing is always a necessary evil, but if we can speed it up with a little shorthand, a little fast coding, oh, it's going to just save your firm a lot of time. Now remember, we had 2 other articles and videos along with LeanLaw settings where we really got deep into some of the main settings of LeanLaw. This is more of the— I think it's the fun stuff. This is a great task for an admin to just kind of aggregate all the bills and invoices that you've sent out to clients recently. Look for sayings that you use over and over. There's a lot of that that happens in a law firm. We use the same language on all the invoices. Depending on your practice area, you might say certain things. Family law, met with clients and had a meeting or had a deposition, or you had even a mediation, whatever you have that's language that you use over and over again, this is the stuff you want to have as a snippet and a shortcode. So, as you type it, it's just a simple matter of entering. Now, it's a little bit tricky. In my brain, I want to hit the Enter button. You have to hit the Space button. I think it's just something you just have to get used to. Shortcodes are really new, but they're really cool. Let me share my screen and I'm going to show you how to use them. And how powerful they're going to be for time saving at your firm. The more you can save time, less data entry, that's where this automation stuff comes in, the better it's going to be for your firm saving time, not taking time to bill and make saving time using that time with a client where it's billable time that you're actually getting paid for the time that your staff or yourself are working on a file. Let me share my screen. So here we are in Settings. So we've already covered Firm Setup. We've covered a little bit of Leads, though I did say go back and do Bigger article on leads. We've done the integrations. We haven't done integration with Gravity. I probably will do a whole article on Gravity and a post and how wonderful it is and how great it is to connect to Gravity and have that the piece of automation because it integrates with LeanLaw. So another place that it's super simple and they have a really great way to log into their, their account, which I just, I really like. It's just great because it keeps the firm compliant. That's the big reason why I like it. So as we come over here to Team Settings, we've got Snippets and Shortcodes and obviously Practice Area. I'll just dive into Practice Area for a moment. You can place here the practice area for your firm. If you have multiple, you can put multiple. And then it's just a way that you might want to track inside of LeanLaw what practice area— remember, we only have one legal accounting, legal account we connect to, Legal Fee Income, real generic. So if you want to track the practice area, you do it here. So Just like in Clio, you do it in the software for the legal time and billing. You don't do it in QuickBooks. If you do it in QuickBooks, it's a little bit of a manual process. You have to go into the reclass tool and move it all out. Why do it twice? If it's in the software, you track it, you get it here. So it's easy enough to just hit Create and then type the name in and you can make one default. So that's an option too. So over here, we're going to come over to the snippets and shortcodes. This is where the magic is. This is where it's so exciting. I think it's so great to have. This is like TextExpander inside of LeanLaw. That's all this is. It's just, it's such a big time saver. So if you wanted to make, let's say, case conference. So you've got a client that has a case conference and you type case conference all the time. You just do all this work and you're always doing case conferences. So let's make a shortcode for it. So first, to make the snippet, you can always add a snippet. I think my picture might be in the way here. I'm not quite sure. So if you wanted to add a shortcode, you can certainly add a new snippet right here. Um, and just type in whatever you see repetitively that you are doing over and over again. Just get the admin or the paralegal or somebody on staff, even if it's you, if you're, you know, solo, just look at all the invoices you produced in the past and then start to see the, the repetitive nature of the words that you use over and over with different clients. Get a little— just take that and put it in a spreadsheet. Start to make the language a little more generic so you can repetitively use it and it doesn't have names in it. And then use the word client or however you want to word it, even if you have to put the names in, you can just modify it as you go along, but it's going to save you time from typing out all those long sentences. There's a lot of, a lot of language on invoices for attorneys, and I think this is a great way to save the data piece. So with a shortcode, I'm just going to— I'm just going to actually just edit Case Conference, and I'm going to make a shortcode for it. So every time I type CC, that's going to stand for Case Conference. I'm going to submit that. Now I've just edited one that's here. Like I said, you can add as many as you want, and just— you just add the language here if you're going to add a snippet. If I wanted to add a snippet for, um, let's see what we have here. Met with client at our office and reviewed. So now I'm adding a snippet. I don't have to type those words anymore. I can just put it there. If I want to figure out a way to make that a shortcode, I can, or I can just leave it here and grab it when I need it. So I'm going to take you over to the time entries. We're going to add a time entry so you can see the power behind having these here. And it's firm-wide. So what it does when it's firm-wide is now you're keeping a very cohesive unit of the language that's being used over and over by all the attorneys. So it's very seamless for the firm. You're really streamlining the look and the language that goes on your invoices for all the entire firm. So every attorney on staff can use this language and kind of modify it and use these shortcuts to save time. So I'm going to come over here. I'm just going to grab— I'm the timekeeper. I'm going to create an entry. I'm going to just pick a random client. Let's pick Coastal Motors here. Let's pick a matter, insider trade in defense. And then I can pick this one. Actually, Coastal Motors is a leads billing. Let me pick somebody like McKernan Motors here. Okay, so acquisition. So it's not leads. We don't have to worry about codes. Now I'm going to come over here and say we had a case conference. You could put any snippet here that you want if you want to grab. Now I know I have this— see the CC, it's already in there to tell me that it's got a shortcode. But say I want a meeting with client to discuss and I want to say case conference, so I'm going to hit CC and then I'm going to hit the spacebar and it just puts case conference in. So you can really start to make shorthand and make light work out of doing your time and billing. And then obviously you put in your hours, um, or you can do your start and your end time if you want to have it calculated. We can say it was an hour. And if you're using fixed fee, you can put it in fixed fee. If not, if it's not, maybe this client had fixed fee, which is why that box popped open. We're gonna get into fixed fee in a moment. And I'm just gonna create this as a time entry. And obviously you can write the rest of the words here, you know, blah, blah, whatever else goes here that needs to be put into the language of the invoice that's specific for this client. I'm just gonna create the entry. So it's an hour of time and I'm putting it in as the timekeeper time. So it's my time, whatever I have at timekeeper, $250 an hour. So now this is here waiting to be billed out to current and motor— motors. That's how simple that was. So you could see how you can really get good at typing and flying through the billing with this amazing feature. Now let me go back to the settings. We'll go touch upon some of the other settings in here. I'm just really excited about this one because I think it's— the shortcodes just kind of blew my mind. I really love it. Now we're going to move on to— we've already covered practice area. Now we're going to move on to the fixed fee templates. This is another time saver for a firm. And as we jump in here, I've already created one. I can just take you on a little tour of it. A simple divorce. So this is a great one if firms are starting to look more into doing fixed fee billing. Fixed fee billing is a way to release yourself of the hourly billing. You're limited to the hours in a day. So this way, if you're selling a repeated product— I see this a lot with immigration firms— they create like a menu, and then on the menu they create things that they sell to the people who want to become U.S. citizens. And there's different things that go along with that. So they create like a menu style, so they create fixed fee. Now they can still track their time with fixed fee, but it's not billable. So tracking it to make sure that you are pricing it properly is really a critical step, in my opinion. I created this one. It's a simple divorce. So you could have a divorce if you're family law, maybe you have a simple divorce, it's non-contested, as opposed to more complex divorce. Maybe a complex one's $10,000, and obviously this is pretty cheap for a divorce. 10-hour limit, so you're limiting the attorney if it triggers over that time as they're tracking their time. It will trigger that there's an additional fee. This is all really going to be set up with the law firm in conjunction with the with the law firm itself as you set these fixed fees up because you want to make sure that you set it up in such a way that it's tracking tracking the piece of it, tracking the flow of it. You want to make sure that the law firm isn't losing their shirt basically if they're spending a lot of time with a client on a divorce that was sold as simple and then you may have to bill over and all that will come in the language of the contract that the that the client is agreeing to with the law firm. So you probably want to get really involved in that. We also have revenue allocation here. So this one's set up for the user Alicia Florick as the attorney, and then she's the only attorney on this simple divorce. You can set up percentages. You can set up this to be, you know, the percent of hours. The amount is set so it's not over $1,000, and you can set fixed fee, the fixed fee amount, the allocated amount. In her case, you know, it could be 100%, and then it's $1,000, and then I can just save it. And I hope this will save. She gets all of that money. So now it's saved. That's specific, specific to her, that this is her simple divorce fixed fee. A lot of law firms, depending on the tenure of the attorney, they might charge— if you want the lead attorney on your simple divorce, you might pay more because that attorney has earned that hourly rate or value. So you might have multiple— so you'd have Simple Divorce Floric, you can name it whatever you want on your label so you can track that. And that'll be only available for her to bill out. She— that's her specific fixed fee template. And these are shared with everybody in the firm, so know that that's there. Obviously it's very powerful if you can track the time and any expenses can be added in. It depends on how you set the contract up. Now, expense templates— this is really for when you're doing the billing and you want to have this in place for when you're billing a client soft costs. So indirect costs, things like copies, faxing, filing fees, postage— these are things you add on if it's agreed upon in the contract. Again, you're going to have these available. So if you had to fax something, maybe you work workers' comp and you collection, you had to fax something to the insurance company that might get billed back to the client. Filing fee, if you're having to set the court fee and you don't have it tagged Sometimes firms will not maybe pay it directly. They might pay in a big bill. This is a faster way maybe to get it in. I prefer if you've got a bill that has multiple clients on it that you're paying filing fees, it's still direct. You just line item it out in QuickBooks and, and put advanced client costs as the account and put the names in. So it's not one you typically see, but maybe you're doing that because you're redoing migrating data over and you need to have that available to do because you don't have costs from prior years because you're only migrating over specific years. So it's a good way to do that and get that in quickly. Postage is one we see a lot too, and it can vary with clients, but things like maybe doing research that there's really no way— maybe you're— you've got a paralegal doing research on multiple— for multiple clients, and you really don't have a way to specifically set that time with the client. You can do it and call it research, and research is a flat fee. So it's however you want to set this up. And again, this is going to be used so when you come over to do the expenses for the client, you can come over here and do expenses. This is soft costs. Remember, these are things you add on later, and then you can just go and create an expense. I can pick my client here. My picture's in the way a little bit. Let's pick Mariette Martinez, and let's just pick that I'm doing estate planning, so I had to do some postage for her. And I'm just going to add it in and I'm going to save it. And you can just come in here and do soft costs once, once a week if you want to have that job and just be one— you know how when you do one task all the time it's easier? Or you can have it as you go and the staff just knows to add those soft costs as they go along. Now you can see that that's available. So when I do ready to bill to Mariette, and I don't even know what she's got on here, but I do ready to bill and I do the client Mariette Martinez. I'm going to see that that is one of the things that's available to me to bill back to her. You can see it's there, the expense is there. So when I do an invoice, obviously I would track time as well. I would bill that with the expenses and it would show up on a separate section of the invoice. So that's it in the team settings. It's a little bit shorter than the past few weeks that we've been kind of rocking and rolling through these big expansive settings, and this is just the team settings, but I thought it would be a great week to do this particular part because this is where you're going to save time using the software. This is not anything if you decided to just use QuickBooks you'd be able to do. It doesn't have that capability. But in LeanLaw, you've got these ways to speed up your time and billing process, that process of getting the invoicing out to the clients, which can be tedious. So remember, this is a way to get it done quicker. If you're using fixed fees, this is definitely a way to make and preset all the language on your fixed fees to make it Very simple to pull that up to invoice to your clients. I hope that's helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Remember to hit the subscribe button so you can follow me and all the videos that I do, and I'll be continuing with lien law settings as we go through here. And if you are an accountant or bookkeeper interested, you can always join our Law Lab group. It's the Accountants Law Lab. It's on Facebook, and we also have a private group that we meet every week and we discuss these things. We go through the apps and do these things. So I hope you all have a wonderful week, and until next week, we'll see you there. Bye now.