Legal Software LeanLaw Settings Part 1

Hi there. Linda Artisani, Artisani Accounting. This week we're going to dive into LeanLaw, the product, the app that I use for attorneys. And it's the legal app that we put on top of QuickBooks Online Advanced to give it that legal feel. Gives you that good time and billing software. It gives you so many features that attorneys need that you could do some workarounds in QuickBooks, but it will never get you to the place that this will help you with some automation and save you a lot of time. I'm going to take you through the, the higher-tiered product in LeanLaw with all the bells and whistles, only because the other versions just strip down. So if you're a brand new attorney stepping out on your own, you might want to start with the, the lower one. The pricing is so insignificant, the difference in the pricing, that it's really worth going for the higher-tiered product from the beginning. But it's up to you if you want to make that choice. Let me share my screen. I'm just going to take you around the settings, explain them a little bit to you, and give you an idea of what it— you need to think about when you set this product up. It's really important to get those settings right the first time. So as always, this is my demo file. This is just a file that I've used to make these videos, and, and I've used them to demo, demo with my clients. So if you see anything kind of weird in here, that's probably why it looks like that. So this is in the settings. So when you first log into LeanLaw, you know, you've got that gear over here on the right side. It's your Settings tab. And this is My Info. So this is a view from the accountant's side. If you're an accountant or bookkeeper setting up for your client, this would probably be where you would see— it would look a little bit different if you're a partner, but for the most part, we fill this stuff out for them. So the Info, Rates, and Tools. So we're going to go right down into the Firm sections because that's really where we want to go. Team settings are really important as well. We will get into that, but I'm going to just give you the firm settings this week. We'll get into the team stuff next week. So for firm info, I really went out on a limb here and created a company called Law Firm. That's my creative person here. It's my demo file. I can make a custom field here. Obviously, I've made one for timekeeper. You can create these. You get 3 of them that you can create with LeanLaw. And they will connect to the fields in custom fields that you create in QuickBooks, which is why you want that version, QuickBooks Online Advanced, to get that custom fields power to connect these and really streamline and make this product maybe like a product you used in the past and you just can't live without a specific maybe file number field or something very specific to your practice area. This is where you're going to be able to create that in LeanLaw. Create it in QuickBooks and then connect it in LeanLaw. So you have some options here. Require user on expenses, for sure, if you want to have that clicked off. If you've got a larger firm, you want to track who's putting the expenses in. So if there's ever a question about where the expense is when you're billing it back to the client, you want to have that there for like soft costs, things that you're going to be entering in manually. Require user on fixed fee. I love fixed fee billing. I have to say that I'm hoping that attorneys start to shift their pricing model away from hourly into fixed fee billing. I am seeing it with some of the millennials and the younger attorneys. But you might want to have a user on that as you start to create some of these so that you know exactly who created it. If you don't need that, if it's smaller firm, you've got one person doing the billing, it's not necessary to have that there. But if you check that box off, you're going to have that capability to see who created it. So it's a little bit of a way to map or an audit log to see who made those specific fixed fees. Require an originating attorney on matters. Now, if you have originating and responsible attorneys, you want to have that on there so you can track it for compensation purposes. So that's basically why you'd want to do that. So default time entry, this is Not that new, but you can do the 10th or you can do rounding up to the quarter hour. So that depends on the firm, depends on what your settings are. But you might want to look at that in your company. However you were doing it in the past, you want to keep it streamlined to be the same. So there's not a lot of changes. That's up to you and the firm. And then do you want to enforce the rounding? See, rounding up. So you just want to let me know that that's here. I love that LeanLaw gives us a button for downloading LeanLaw data. So we just had to do that for a client when we're kind of working on cleaning up something that they already were an existing LeanLaw client. and we're taking out the data. It dumps it down to a spreadsheet, but several files. So it separates the time, separates the expenses. It's really nice. It does it super fast. So that's another good feature about LeanLaw. The subscription is the subscription that you have, whether it's Pro or the core product. Users. So we went through all of this last week. You don't have to really worry about that. User permissions. We'll get into the trust accounting. So as we come into trust accounting, here's where you're going to connect your trust account, your trust bank account. to your trust account in LeanLaw and your trust liability account. So these are 3 ways that you want to track your, you know, your trust, your legal software to your bank account, to your trust liability accounts. Now LeanLaw, don't forget LeanLaw does this in a way where you've got the parent header liability account. You want to have different ones for different— if you have more than one trust bank account, you really want to have that liability account parent one with all the sub-ledgers underneath it separated. So I can see if there's something off on my trust account, I want to see which account's off. And if you have only everything under one trust liability header account, parent account, it's hard to find. It's much better practice to set up the trust account and connect the trust account settings in LeanLaw to that trust bank account and then to a separate liability account for each trust bank account. I hope that makes sense. You want to connect your operating accounts. This is where I'm connected to QuickBooks. So I've already done the integration. I should show you the integration probably first. So I've connected QuickBooks to LeanLaw. First step you want to do is connect that. So you want to connect the file. Once it's connected, you will see that there's some things here that you want to start to set up. So what is the service account that you have in QuickBooks that aligns with— so your income account, what is it, your product or service? What is your product or service which codes back to your income account? You get one connection with QuickBooks. Now, I know a lot of people want to have multiple practice areas. A place that you may have been doing this manually without the settings of an outside application or software like LeanLaw, and you may have had like multiple practice areas. So you had the parent income with the sub accounts for the income. But you can't do that in LeanLaw. You can manually push it and separate it if you want. I don't see a need to do that because you have reports that will give you that data. But we usually typically set this up. Normally it would say legal services here that you're connecting to the product inside of QuickBooks that will be driving through the invoicing. So when we create invoices inside of LeanLaw, they push into QuickBooks and they're actually invoiced of QuickBooks. It's an important piece to understand that LeanLaw doesn't push it out and stay siloed away from QuickBooks. It integrates with QuickBooks. LeanLaw has 2-way syncing when it comes to expenses. So I can push from a DAX or even from QuickBooks itself, upload a receipt or a bill and put that right into QuickBooks, code it to Advanced Client Costs, and LeanLaw, because it can see these items, it's going to pull that up to be billed later. to the client. So that's a feature that many of the products don't have. It really works really well, the syncing. Here you'd want to edit your expenses. I'll just take you in here so you can see. I'm going to look like I'm setting this up for the first time. You know, you want— it says Terry Client Costs. So maybe I want to change this. So I'm going to change the settings to be Advanced Client Costs because I can tell you that I'm going to enable the sync. And I'm going to hit Next. And I'm going to change this to be Advanced Client Costs. So we had Terry in here. So Advanced Client Costs, either current asset or you can create it new. So if you didn't have that inside of QuickBooks, you can create this now and it will actually create that account in QuickBooks, which is really nice. So I'm going to select the one I already have in the file. Usually you would have your setting, your chart of accounts already set up. Advanced Client Costs here. And I can pick the date. So if I am starting in LeanLaw from a specific date and I've already done all the back work, from, uh, in a different way, maybe a different software, maybe you're coming over from PracticePanther or something else, you want to pick the date. I can pick the date as, um, today, and then I'm going to hit Next. And then expenses that are going to create— be created in LeanLaw, they're expenses that don't have a car— if these are expenses that don't have a corresponding asset, so this is your soft cost, the cost that copying and postage and things like that. So I want to pick Different because they are different. I want to create an account for this. I already have this account inside of QuickBooks that it's grabbed, but you can create this on the fly if you're starting to do your file here and you don't have a full-blown chart of accounts in QuickBooks. You can actually do this from LeanLaw and it will create those accounts inside of QuickBooks. Again, pick that product and service. You want to have that special product and service that it's going to tag when you create these types of soft costs. And I just like to have it really clearly noted. And obviously, I'm only syncing from today, so it shouldn't take that long. And then I'm done. So now that's set to track right to these— those specific settings. And that's how easy it is. Now, for the operating account, I can see— one of the big questions I should say before I get too far here, One of the big questions is, do you bill your clients on a matter level or do you bill your clients on a client level? So if you have a client with multiple matters, how are you billing them? Are you billing them separately each matter? Maybe you have a divorce and estate planning with a client and you send that out separately like they're separate customers or clients by the matter level. Or are you sending out, you know, John Smith and he had estate planning and then he has also divorce. So you would have that all on one invoice. How do you bill? So that's really crucial because that's going to be part of these settings. You really have to determine which one's best for you. I have some more detail on this because this is such an important decision. I have more detailed information on how to choose that in the blog post that's attached to this, this particular video. Do you want the matters Marked Build with Parent. So if you have that setting— and that's a setting in QuickBooks— so if you look at the hierarchy of a customer, you have Joe Smith, and underneath Joe Smith Divorce, Joe Smith Estate Planning. So those are sub-level sub-customers. So you want to know, do you want to bill Joe Smith and then include those sub-customers underneath? Then that would be a client billing. Or do you want to have it be Billing Joe Smith Estate, Joe Smith Divorce. So that's your choice you need to make. So you can turn this button, toggle, toggle the button on or off. If I switch here, I can switch it to yes or leave it as no. Do you want to create— so most of your workflow for client-based items are going to start right here inside of LeanLaw. So do you want the client and the matter created? So as the clients come in and you start to ask maybe for a request for trust, Do you want that to happen here in LeanLaw? And it's going to create that automatically into QuickBooks. I usually have that button turned on. Why do I have to do it twice? Why would I want to set it up in QuickBooks, set it up in LeanLaw, connect them? No, I want to set it up in LeanLaw, send LeanLaw the message to send it to QuickBooks and connect it and create it. So that's what I usually set up. You can do here, you can select online credit card or online ACH. Some of our clients are very specific. They don't want to do ACH only. They only want to do ACH. They don't want to do credit cards. So it's really important that they set it up so that they do the billing where they bill to just ACH. They don't want to do credit cards. I've done so many videos on this. One of the beauties of using LeanLaw is you can use Gravity Legal. Create an account. It's very automated. You can have the client pay the credit card fee or you can absorb the credit card fee. So much versatility here. If you're paying out, getting a payment to trust, Gravity Legal will put it in trust and keep you compliant with the fees for the credit card being booked over in the operating. Great, great, great software. Highly recommended, especially if you're using LeanLaw. They work really well because it's just incredibly integrated inside the system. So that's over here on the left-hand side. And if you wanted to sign up with Gravity, you can reach out. If you have any questions, we can put you in touch with the right people to get that to happen. 58% more chance of being paid quickly and instantly if you use credit cards. 58%. That's a high amount, right? So you want to think about that if you're finding that you're having to bother clients. Clients are more apt to open the email and click a payment link and pay you that fast. than they are if you're trying to do the check processing where they see the email, they got to go home, grab their checkbook. It's just too much friction in that workflow where if you have the payment links, you're going to find that's going to ease up your, your cash flow in your firm. Very much worth it. Raise your rate a little bit if you're doing hourly. Just raise your rate or raise your subscription or raise your fixed fees enough to cover the fees. That way you don't have the clients going, why do I have to pay the fee? You bundle it in. It's what we do at our firm. We just bundle it in and it's there. They pay the credit card. It works wonderfully. If you're going to use— and you have to do it here. So here's— I have to say here, if you're going to do invoice payment methods, you have to click here to get that to happen inside of QuickBooks. If you're using LeanLaw and QuickBooks, has to be set here. Otherwise, you'll be forever having to click the links in QuickBooks. So it's really important to know that as you're setting up your file, that these buttons have to be selected in order to make sure that it happens all the time. So every invoice will have that button checked off. So it's very important to do it here inside the system. Class tracking, we use all the time for the larger firms. We track by attorney to see which one's bringing in more money, which one's the rainmaker, which one's not, maybe not doing as well. We do it right here in the system. We set up the classes in QuickBooks, we set up the class tracking here. And last week I mentioned how you can connect the classes to users so that it's tracked fluently. If you need to go back to that video, you can find that. But class tracking, very, very effective. We like to track— we just always track classes for the bigger firms per attorney. If you're one person, you don't need to do that. Invoice email CC and BCC, very important as well if you want to have that go to the attorney. So as the attorneys maybe do their billing, or maybe you do the billing, if you need to push that CC or BCC to someone to have a record. So if somebody says, I didn't get your email, you can say, oh yeah, we sent it out last week in the middle of the week. If they say they didn't get it, you have proof that they have it. You have that visibility in QuickBooks as well. You can see if they've opened it and read it, which I've had that be a pretty effective conversation when someone said they hadn't opened it or we never received that email. You can go right into QuickBooks and see that. But this is a nice place to have if you want to just— it's easy to track where the person can send the BCC or the CC. As we go through here, there's just so much. I probably should make this 2 videos for certain. We're going to go into billing and workflows next week and you can see how that works. Invoice presentation will be a whole nother video and reports. Obviously, client and matter ID is really important and we'll go into that as well. But this is just really going over some of the QuickBooks settings. Setting up, trying to connect everything. It's the really the first thing you need to do after you invite the users is really connect this system and make it work for you. So this is all about QuickBooks integration with LeanLaw. And setting it up for success is definitely a big part of making sure your LeanLaw is set up to work so you're happy with the system. It's very automated, it's very secure. You are able to really track your your settings nicely where you're able to see that high-level visibility inside the balance sheet and able to track and really keep your trust accounting pristine. And that's really what we're looking to do as accountants and bookkeepers is make sure that that trust accounting is just spot on so we don't have to worry about any issues with it. I hope that's helpful in learning a little bit about the settings. We really only got into the integrations here and we got a little bit about the trust accounting and connecting there. We will go in next week and the week after and just continue with this series on learning these settings. I hope that helps, and we'll see you all next week. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any videos. And on that note, I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now.