Attorneys, are you looking for a proven way to eliminate redundant tasks? This can not only free up your time for better things but also allow you to focus on the more complex or pressing matters that need your immediate attention!

Enter LeanLaw Team Settings. With team settings and snippets and short codes, you and members of your law firm will receive the technology needed so everyone is on the same page. No more tedious writing down the same language on multiple invoices.

So what does it mean for your team when you use streamlined language on your invoices and shortcuts like shorthand? It means that not only will you be able to save time by eliminating redundant tasks, but money as well by implementing technology tools that optimize using resources effectively!

“The average lawyer only spends 28% (close to 2 hours & 15 minutes) of a workday on billable tasks and projects. Law Technology Today”

As we get deeper into the settings of LeanLaw, my two favorite time savings tools are snippets and now the newly added shortcodes.

What is a Snippet?

A snippet is just that. A short repetitive text that is used in your billing on your client invoices over and over again. This is the way to give your firm a uniform look at the invoices. These snippets are shared by all users in your firm. A best practice is to review last month’s invoices and look for language that is similar and typed over and over again. I recommend starting a spreadsheet of the language. Then review the spreadsheet for similarities and look for how you can generalize the text to work for the entire firm.

To find the “Snippets” section, go to settings gear>Team settings on the left navigation bar. Then click on snippets and short codes. Over to the right side, you can add the snippets. These snippets will be available to use when editing or creating time entries, on both the Calendar page and the Time Entries page. When you click a snippet from this dropdown, LeanLaw will automatically copy and paste the text into the time entry’s description.

What is a Short Code?

A short code is a few letters, numbers, and/or other characters — like shorthand — that you can connect to a snippet. It took me a bit of playing around with short codes to have them populate. I wanted to hit the tab button but you actually type the short code and hit the space bar for them to populate. This is very much like a text expander but more like shorthand, if you are old enough to remember that from high school. It is a super time-saver as it is like snippets on steroids. Type your shortcut and spacebar and it auto-populates!

Snippets don’t require short codes to work, but by assigning a short code to a snippet, any time you type that short code in a description field, plus a space, LeanLaw will automatically replace your short code with all of the text you connected to the short code as a snippet. You can literally wiz, zip, and fly through the billing tasks that are often the most time-consuming, manual tasks at a law firm.

Practice Area

Matters can be assigned to a practice area. If your firm is a multiple practice area firm, I highly recommend you track the practice area in order to determine which area is more profitable. By assigning a practice area in LeanLaw, you will be able to track them by matter for reporting purposes. If you also want to track this in QuickBooks, I highly recommend creating a custom field for this purpose. It will be a bit of a manual process, but you will have that data in the full accounting software. Is this necessary? Depends on the client. We don’t typically advise adding this additional step because it is doing work twice without automation.

Fixed Fee

Besides billing hourly, many of the firms that are forward-thinking are adding fixed fee billing. You can set a matter as a fixed fee type, which allows a set amount to be invoiced to a client. This is typically something we see with firms that have a menu of services that they sell, like a family law practice or an immigration firm.

With fixed fees, the amount is agreed upon and set, and we will still track time entries default as “non-billable”. Fixed fee matters default to non-billable which means that the time recorded is considered part of the fixed fee. Time entries can be changed to be hourly billed if necessary.

You can set a maximum amount of hours allowed on this “set” service. Tracking the hours will help you analyze whether the fixed fee is sufficient. Fixed fees can be either a one-time event, recurring monthly, quarterly, or annual. Also, an hourly limit can be set for fixed fees.

You can also set the revenue allocation for one or multiple attorneys that work on the matter. LeanLaw gives you so much flexibility with tracking the revenue. You can allocate it by the amount or by percentage. To access this area, click the revenue allocation tab.

Expense Templates

Also a time saver. This is to be used for your soft costs. The ones you have to enter manually. To learn more about soft costs, check out this article that goes into detail about what these indirect costs are for. Presetting the ones typically used in your firm will save you so much time with the entry of these. Below is a picture of the common ones I see at most law firms. Remember a firm may use an Administrative fee in lieu of soft cost entry.

This concludes my series on how to set up LeanLaw for success for your law firm. Next week I will be diving into LEDES billing and what is unique about it. Until next week! If you need help setting up LeanLaw, find us!

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