LeanLaw Time Saving Features

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. This week is all about a couple of features in LeanLaw that I believe I find are a little bit underused. When I start to work with a new attorney, I'm finding that they're not using these 2 particular features, and I think they're pretty important because they help streamline the workflow and automate the workflow. As well as making more of a uniform verbiage that the, that the firm uses overall. So if you have multiple attorneys, it's nice to have that uniform language on all the invoices so it looks like you're a cohesive firm. Let me share my screen and I'm going to take you to LeanLaw. I'm just going to show you, it's just 2 areas. This will be a short video, but it should be an effective one. And it's just 2 places that maybe you're not using that maybe will help you save time. And we all, even attorneys, need to save time. Admin staff needs to save time. Accountants need to save time. Let me share my screen. So here we are in LeanLaw, and I'm going to take you over to where the text snippets are, where you can start to save time with just some of the language that you can pre-type and use when you do the timer and use it as an attorney. You can use it for when you start to track the time and use it for not having to type all those words over and over and over again in an invoice. So you're gonna come over to the gear. And you can just go over to text snippets. And all you have to do is come over here and I'm just going to do meeting with, and that's it, meeting with. And now I can use that. And it doesn't save a lot, but all these little things save time, right? The more you can craft the language here, the better. So I can do meeting with, and then I can grab that and type that in when I do the bill, or I can write meeting with client to discuss. Now I'm getting more Into really using this as a power tool, right? So start to take a look at some of your invoices, see what you write over and over again, and can you figure out a way to work the language so that you can eliminate a lot of the typing? So let's see how that works in action. So I'm going to go over to Timer Entries. I'm just going to create an entry here, and I like to use the Advanced— I like the Advanced tab on so I can maybe change— a lot of times these firms use a lot of different Use a lot of different rates for different clients. So I'm just going to grab a client. I'm just going to grab Seth. And then I'm going to come in here and just type in, use the snippet I just created. Meeting with client to discuss legal matter. And see, now you could even have that as yours and then not have to type those words in. So be creative. And I'll just go blah, blah, blah. And then that's it. Now I'm going to put in my rate here is, you know, I like Seth. I'm only going to charge him $250. I'm going to say that it was an hour's worth of time. And then I'm just going to hit Create the Entry here and then Create the Entry. And now it's there. It's ready to be billed to my client the next time we do a billing. So that is the power behind this. The other place that we can do a way to save time is in expenses. So if you have soft costs, it's nice to be able to have those available. The words— maybe you have soft costs like copy fee, maybe you have postage, maybe you have a fax fee. Those are things that you might have that you, you sell back to your client, but you don't really get the— you don't have one bill for it. It's a soft cost. You just bill it back per client as needed, right? Because you're not going to charge a client for every stamp. So in that case, you can come over here to the gear again. And we'll come over to expense templates. And this is where you can start to add things. in here. You can add things in for leads billing as well. That's why they have the codes here. So you can add an expense and we'll just, we'll add faxing because I just mentioned faxing. So I'm going to start over here and just give it the label fax. And then I'm going to give it a, you know, $5 fee. And then if it is a leads billing, you can grab that here. You can see there's a lot of things in here that you can grab. This might be a way that you start to think in your head for even the Text snippets. And then this description, you know, faxed records. So now it's in here. And when you do a soft cost, if I wanted to do a soft cost to— let's go to expenses. If I wanted to add an expense, and this is not adding a hard cost. So this is not something that I'm going to pay that's specific to the matter, like maybe a filing fee, where I'll be tagging it into QuickBooks, and then the 2-way sync will bring it up. This is just specifically like postage or something like that. And I'll see if I can grab Seth again. And I'll just grab my tech— my template that I just created. So it's a fax. And then you'll see it says fax records. So now that's on there. It's got the amount on there. It just saves a lot of time. And that will save time when we do the billing. So when I go to do my bill, I've got my time, my ready to bill. I'm going to see here that my matter for Seth, I've got my time that I have on here that's billable and I've got my expenses. So as you can see, as I pull up this draft invoice, you can see that there's the stuff that I had tracked for the time. And then we've got the fax records under my expenses, my soft cost. And then I also on this, this file have an admin fee, which is something that some firms just put in as a general rule. And I can save that. And obviously, I can approve it and move it along, and then pop it into QuickBooks. But that's for another video. So I hope this is helpful. I hope that just these couple of features, you'll see, are big time savers. It's one of the benefits of using LeanLaw. I'm going to try to do these short videos and just kind of take you on a little ride through a lot of the features that are here. And until next time, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now.