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Law firm invoice template for Legal

hi there linda artesani artisani accounting as promised this week we're going to speak about that specialized invoicing that law firms use called leads so it's l-e-d-e-s and it stands for a legal electronic data exchange standard l-e-d-e-s another acronym right we have lots of little codes in acrobat acronyms when we work with law firms and leads is one of them and you could probably work at a law firm the whole time and never have to do leads but depends on the type of law firm you work at you'll see leads typically at a firm that deals with workers comp claims you'll see it with a bankruptcy law firm these are different practice areas you'll see it at a law firm that maybe works with large corporations so the corporation itself like for example just just for example microsoft so if your law firm works with the company microsoft then and they're invoicing microsoft for legal services they may ask for the form the the invoice to be produced in the leads format and just so you know that that's one of the ways that you're going to be able to understand why that is it's done for that purpose so microsoft may do business with 50 different states they want the formatting to be the same and if you work at multiple law firms you know a lot of the invoices look different there's choices that they can make when they do the formatting and it's sometimes a personal preference but when it comes to leads it's uniform so that's the reason why companies will go for that particular look of the invoices so you are going to learn a little bit about that here today and how that works so basically it was in 1998 that they released the first version of leeds billing format and it typically is just a widely accepted uh industry standard and it greatly reduced the need for law firms to educate their clients on billing practices it just said this is it it's almost like a template per se but if you think about how it looks it looks like computer code and it's actually just a lot of shortcuts and once you figure out how it works it makes sense when you look at it but the first time you print something out and leaves you look at it i can remember saying this looks like gobbledygook i couldn't even make sense out of it but once you figure out how it works you bill exactly for what the firm did so the clients are going to see exactly what their tasks or expenses that they're paying for it's very uniform and standardized in the in the invoices itself and it will protect the law firm by requiring them to have information that is ready readily acceptable accessible so it one of the things i like about it is it keeps the attorneys fixated on specific tasks and they tasks are by code so you once you learn the code and the formatting of it it makes a lot of sense so you don't have to waste a lot of time and resources trying to adapt to any new standards and this particular leads the one that's most popular was created and released in 1998 but then they've since then they've kind of worked through a few variations so when you start to look at different building time and billing software most of them are done with the 1998 d version because that's the most popular one that you'll see so if you have to upload upload these forms it gives out uh it'll spit out a report basically or the invoice itself and it's just a pipe delimited plain text file and it has 24 fields on it and there's been some newer releases of leads as well but more standard is the leads 1998 d version and then once you see it you're going to know that these are set up to track just the activities or tasks that are required in for example a bankruptcy there's a specific set rules that go along with how that would happen or how that would go down our typical bankruptcy or even litigation um you'll see this with a trademark attorney as well and again that legal that workers comp insurance is also one of the leads tracks so trackers and then they have activity codes so sometimes they're called v codes and it's information to add into what specific actions that the attorney is performing so basically and you'll see it when you start to look at the codes a lot of good software will have those codes built right in you just select the ones you need so if you're working with a bankruptcy one you're only going to probably pick the ones that start with the letter b for bankruptcy l is the litigation ones that's how the coding is it's really simplified but once you start to do that and e is for expense code so the expenses would all get tagged as well and that'll all push into that invoice so that it gets printed out there's some timekeeper codes too that you will see on invoices in addition to the other things so the task code and the fee code you might see both and then of course the rates and the hours and that will all get pushed out i'm going to share my screen and then i'm going to take you into when we come into the task of showing you how it's set up in lean law i know we actually just went through lean law settings and it's part of it but in case you just landed here because you googled leads billing and you wanted to know what it is i'm going to take you through it in the through the lean law lens there is also cleo has the same thing that you can look at it through clio it's got like a converter that will convert an invoice to it basically what lean law does too it just does it kind of in a different way it looks like you're printing to leads where clio will actually say it's converting and would lean launch just all the settings and i'll just show you i'll take you to that program and show you what it looks like so as we come in here we're now in the settings section of our demo law firm right here on the right hand side so you can see that it's the gear and it brings you in here and then i'm going to take you right over to leads you can see it right here on the uh on this on the side so you can pick the ones depending on your law firm of what they need to use you can see there's microsoft task and expense codes there are expert codes so if you have expert witnesses if that's the kind of firm that that you're working with patent and trademark if you work with a trademark attorney you'll see those codes litigation and standard activity and expense code so this is all in here makes sense right in court you can use these court ones and then if you're going to start to do that in lean law you have to actually mark the client as a leads client and that way you can have the codes and then of course like i mentioned you can make it so that they have to put the enable leads billing is here you have to turn it on and then once you turn it on you're actually selecting the ones that are used and then you can put in the the codes for the classification so i can actually put in a code specifically for the principal attorney the lead attorney and that way maybe they have to have a specific code on the program that they're uploading to we'll put the code in here it will come out on that invoice when we print an invoice and if there's a law firm id file you want to do that here as well tax id and default invoice description if the leads formatting for the person that you're doing the billing with requires this you want to put this in it's going to save you time when you go to do the work i always call it kind of arts and crafts if you go to upload it and something's not right and the find and replace it's kind of what you're doing you're kind of piecemealing it together so i'm going to come over to let's go to billing here and let's go to quickbooks so i've got one invoice here not paid by mariette marstines and you can see that with leads i've enabled leads on her file actually let me show you that too so let me go to the client mariette but here she is and here's your matter estate planning and then when i go to the leads tab right here i can enable the leads for this client once it's enabled i can do it right here i can pick you can see the leads formatting is here and they actually have a drop down you can change it to whatever one that's necessary for your client which is really flexible um any set settings specific to this matter you want to put in here because if you do leads billing with different with with a bigger law firm you're going to see that it might be personalized settings for specific clients that are different than other clients especially if you work with a law firm that works with really big corporations they may use different legal tracker programs that you log into different ones you really want to have that ability to be able to put the numbers in specific to this client to save you from having to do the arts and crafts and cut and paste you can do this right here you can put it in just for this client require the activity code so that whenever the attorney tracks time they're going to have to put the code in require the task codes and require the expense codes i like to do that so i'm not having to go back because they could be in a hurry and adding the time in but then i have to go back in and add the codes when i go to do the billing i might push the bill all the way out print it to leads upload it in legal tracker and then the next you know in an hour i find out you're missing a code on line seven and then i'm like oh she or he forgot to put the code in then i have to go back and undo the invoice there's just a lot of steps you can avoid by requiring it there okay so let's go back now to billing and let's go to quickbooks so here's my invoice and i want to print it to leads so you're probably going how do i do that well very simply i can come over here select the invoice and then it says deliver and i want to deliver it in leads format and it's right here so i'm going to show you how it can kind of look like gobbly cook so here's my text invoice here i'll bring this over here and you can see invoice date and voice number matter you can see how this kind of just pops out and the computer reads this and you can see that it reads it very quickly so this is the reason why it wants to be needs to be in this format you can see it's in the format leads 1998 b um i think i mentioned d before but b is the most popular one for 1998 the very first version with those tax task codes and so you can see the activity the time keeper line all of that's here and then you would upload this onto the platform that you're bringing the invoicing in on look really simple you just click and then upload the leads invoice and it's very easy to do but it's also a little tricky so when you first start to doing it's a little bit like oh i don't know how to do this so for sure you want to find a software that does things to have produces an invoice in leads make sure the setup is right ask the attorney what what are we doing here what kind of codes are required and then if they if they say to you i need it to go into for example legal tracker because that's the one that comes up in my brain first go to legal tracker and scope it out get in get a user id so you can upload the invoices and then read what they have they're very good on those sites and they're very helpful if you have to call the the help support on those sites they'll help you get through your first leads billing and uploading and getting it processed they're very very responsive when it comes to that and they'll tell you exactly what's missing on the file and what needs to be done as you pull it and if it gets rejected it tells you why it's rejected it'll tell you what line it's rejected on so you can actually go through the line and if it says invoice number in incorrect format you'll know that that's the part that's not working so i hope that helps a short video but hopefully that will give you an idea of how leeds billing works and of course if you have any questions comments feel free to reach out to me we have an amazing facebook group called the accounting accountants law lab accountants with an apostrophe law lab if you want to join us you can ask questions there we have a private group a mastermind group if you're a bookkeeper learning how to do this stuff come join us there and we discuss leads billing as a topic sometimes and if you or or even open forum we can ask any question if you're an attorney and need help with your bookkeeping and you need someone to process these leads bills for you reach out please hit the subscribe button to not miss any videos and we'll see you all next week on the and please if you want to continue getting the videos just click the subscribe button and you won't miss one thank you for watching bye now