Release 25.04 April

There has been an addition to release 25.03, which can be read via the Addition to release 25.03.

Enhanced budget functionality

Legalsense supports budgets based on a matter and/ or submatter. At the moment, if a budget is set, it will be calculated based on all time entries on the selected matter or submatter. Starting from release 25.04, adding a period to a budget with the new fields 'Begin date' and 'End date' will be possible.

When a period is set on the budget, only the time entries written with a date in the selected period will be taken into account. This enhancement gives you four possible options for setting a budget:

• Without a begin and end date: the budget takes all time entries into account written on the matter or submatter. This is the same as the budget functionality before release 25.04.
• With a begin date and a blank end date: the budget takes all time entries into account starting from the begin date and after. 
• With an end date and blank begin date: the budget takes into account all time entries written before the selected end date. 
• With a begin date and end date: the budget takes into account only the time entries written within the selected period. 

Setting multiple budgets for a matter and/or submatter with different or overlapping periods is possible.

To accommodate the new budget per period functionality, we have added two new fields to the budget report: 'Valid from' and 'To'. By applying these filters, the report will display all budgets that are (partially) valid within the selected period. For example, if a budget for a matter is set from 01-01-2025 to 31-12-2025, and you filter the report for the period between 01-04-2025 and 30-04-2025, the full budget will appear in the results.

Budget notifications

In addition to the new period option, the budget notification functionality has been enhanced and made configurable. Previously, Legalsense displayed a yellow notification when 80% of the budget was reached and a red notification at 100% or more.

As of release 25.04, you can now configure these notification thresholds via 'Settings' - 'General' -'System' in the Budget section.

• A blue notification can be enabled for a custom threshold of your choice. By default, this is disabled (set to 0).
• The yellow notification can also be adjusted from the default 80% to any percentage you prefer.
• The red notification remains fixed and will always appear when 100% of the budget is reached; this threshold cannot be changed.

In addition to the enhancements mentioned above, the notification functionality has been extended to include the billing supervisor. You now have the option to notify the timekeeper upon each time entry, or to notify the matter supervisor and/or billing supervisor when a budget threshold is reached.

For more information regarding the budget functionality, please visit our knowledge base article Budgets. 

Disbursements

A new ‘Client’ filter has been added to the disbursement search page. This filter displays all disbursements linked to matters associated with the selected client. 

Invoices

In a previous update, we identified an issue where manually editing the invoice email text prevented dynamic text tags (such as {{ invoice_number }}) from being populated correctly. To resolve this, we changed the rendering of the email text to occur at the moment the invoice is finalized. However, this also meant it was no longer possible to preview the email text before finalizing the invoice.

To address this and avoid returning to the previous situation, we have introduced a 'Preview' button next to the 'Save as draft' button. This allows you to view a preview of the email text at any stage of the billing process, ensuring that you can still review it before sending, even if the invoice hasn’t been finalized yet. 

Other

• IRIS, a partner of iManage, has released a new version of its iManage (Work) API. To support this update, we have renewed our integration to ensure compatibility with the latest API version. This allows customers to transition to the newer version of IRIS Worksite and take advantage of the new features it offers. 
• The ‘Invoices’ - ‘Payments’ and ‘Invoices’ - ‘Emails’ pages have been updated to use the renewed style of Legalsense, consistent with the ‘Users’ section.

APIv3

• All fields from the Addresses endpoint are now accessible via the extra_fields parameter. This enhancement allows you to selectively retrieve specific fields in the list view, reducing query complexity and potentially improving performance. 
• We have made the 'can_archive' field available in the list view of the Matters endpoint, where it was previously only accessible through the detail view. 
• The following fields are added to the extra_fields parameter of the Practicegroups endpoint: 'boss', 'is_active', 'chinese_wall_kind', and 'current_members'. 
• The following fields are added to the extra_fields parameter of the Targets endpoint: 'amount', 'begin_date', 'end_date', 'billable_time', and 'total_time'. 
• We have added the fields 'billed_amount' and 'billed_amount_ex_office_expenses' to the extra_fields parameter of the Invoicelines endpoint. 
• It is now possible to archive and/or unarchive matters via the APIv3 for the Matters endpoint. 
  For unarchiving matters, it is possible to set the field 'keep_archive_number', which is a required boolean field.
  For archiving matters, it is possible to set the following fields:
  • 'archive_date', which is optional and the default set to today
  • 'archive_number', which is optional and by default set to the next number in the settings
  • 'notes', which is optional and default left blank. 
  • 'retention_period', which is optional and and default left blank

Mobile app

A new version (2025.03.28) of our mobile app has been released in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store (Android). This version brings some small performance, stability, and compatibility improvements.

We recommend upgrading to the latest version of our app. Support for earlier versions of the app will be removed in the June release (25.06). Please inform all users within your firm to update to the new version.

For more information about our Legalsense features, please visit our knowledge base.