Streamline Your Process with Our Legal Billing Template for Management

Legal billing template for Management

hi I'm Melanie from streamline legal where we help law firms get the most out of their practice management software tonight we are talking about a brand new feature in Clio and I will tell you that one of my favorite things about this time of year is that we're getting pretty close to the Clio conference and um at that time I find that Clio does start releasing a larger number of new features than they do throughout the rest of the year um so I'm super excited about this newest feature and I hope and expect that there will be even more new features at our conference next month but this feature that we're talking about tonight is called matter templates and it's a great feature like I can't find anything negative about it I mean it just makes life easier right and so let's dive into the screen and I'm going to show you exactly what I'm talking about if you're here in your Clio account in the upper right corner when I'm looking at my matters list in the upper right corner there's a button now that says matter templates and when I click click on that it shows me the different templates that I have or I can create a new template and basically the matter template is going to make the creation of my new matter that much faster and that much easier by pre-populating a bunch of information so if I click on the create new meta template it comes to this screen here and it basically shows me the sections of information that I can pre-populate and card code into my template so for example we're going to go ahead and make this a matter name for this I really think our template name I should say I really do like the idea of starting with templates for each practice area or each type of case within a practice area I think that'll be super helpful so in this case I'm going to say family law and I'm going to say divorce I'm going to say with kids right and so anytime I have a family law case divorce case with children I'm going to go ahead and use this template okay now keep in mind this is not a template I want to use for every single file that I open in Clio if I have a template I want to use for all my files or at least default for all my files I can do that by selecting this little lever here but for tonight I'm not going to do that um the matter description you know maybe I just want the matter description to be to be divorced with kids right or children um maybe I always have the same responsible attorney maybe we have one attorney in our office that does those types of cases if not I can leave it blank we don't have to fill out everything in the template um the originating attorney maybe I'm going to leave that blank because it depends on who brought the work in the location could be different obviously but anytime it's Divorced with kids it's definitely going to fall under my Family Practice area so I can fill out that and then my permissions usually it's going to be um the whole firm right it could be different I can always change it when I actually create the matter these are not set in stone for that template or for that matter they're set in stone for the template but then when I use the template to create the matter I can always adjust things if I need to but it's usually the firm so I'll stick that in there and of course it's usually an open status or else I wouldn't be creating the matter and then I come down here and this is really a great feature I think is my custom Fields I can start putting in the custom field sets that I need so for example for my divorce cases I may have a fair amount of custom fields that I want to go ahead and use for my divorce cases so for an example in this case we've got a divorce field set right here and it's got all of these different dates and information things that I need and then I've also got whoops if I spell it correctly here if I have a field set for children right I've got this family law field set for children I've got other family law field sets by the way my court information my marriage information so I can put all of those in and I've got all these field sets that are going to show up by default when I use this template right and then the last thing is my billing now maybe I'm only doing billing um my divorce cases on an hourly basis so I'm going to go ahead and put that in there and then of course pretty much all my divorce cases are billable so I'm going to go ahead and just save this template again I don't have to make a selection on every field but whatever selection I do make of course will save with the template so I'm going to go ahead and save that template then the really nice part is I can start using those templates and you'll see I've got a couple of them by practice area I can start using those templates when I create my matters right so now when I create a matter it asks me if I want to use an existing template and so I'm going to say well absolutely I want to use my family law this is a divorce case with kids so that'll work out perfectly I still have to put in my clients of course and I have to fill out whatever other information has not been pre-populated but let's say this is just an unusual circumstance and maybe a different attorney than usual is taking this case on so I can go ahead and change that right I can make adjustments to that particular matter even though I've put in the template already and so you'll see when I come down to your custom Fields all my field sets are there waiting for me when I come down to my billing the billing has already been populated the way that I like so it really does save a lot of time and it really Cuts back on the amount of training that we need to do for our team that is opening these files because if I can go ahead and just tell them pick this template it'll give you all the fields that you need or it'll give you all the information pre-populated that you need then it's going to save a ton of time and energy for my clients now let's look at this another way though there may be situations where we don't want to do it by practice area maybe we have a practice where we're doing let's say eviction cases right and we've got a landlord that we represent with some regularity and we've got a lot of different um you know a lot of cases for the same landlord for these eviction files and so I can even come in here and I can create a new template for that particular client if this is a kind of case that I'm doing with some regularity right that same kind of thing can work in corporate matters if we have corporate matters where you know corporate clients I should say where they have numerous matters and you know we're doing the volume of them maybe we're doing you know handling Real Estate Investors handling closings for Real Estate Investors that's another great opportunity for us to be able to create templates that are specific not just to the practice area but also to the actual transaction or to the client I should say and so being able to use them in that way I think saves a lot of time as well so let me know what you think about this feature um if you've given if you give it a try let me know how things go if you've come up with some creative ways to be able to use these templates I'd love to hear about those but I really do think they're a Big Time Saver and so I'd highly encourage you to go ahead and create as many as you think will be helpful for your team thanks so much guys have a great evening I'll talk to you soon