Legal Practice Portal
Secure client portal for a Victorian law firm — document management, trust account integration, and LEAP workflow automation.
Workflow Mapping & Audit
Before any automation was written, we spent two weeks shadowing the office manager through a complete weekly cycle, documenting every data touchpoint between LEAP, Xero, and the firm's email systems. The audit identified 23 distinct manual data transfer tasks that were silently consuming 12 hours of the work week.
- 23 manual data transfer tasks identified and documented with source/destination/format/frequency
- Three-tier risk classification: Critical (trust accounts), High volume (invoicing), Low frequency (client intake)
- Compliance requirements mapped upfront — trust account audit trail, data retention obligations, GST edge cases
- Decision logic captured for every conditional path ("If invoice type is trust, then...")
Key Outcome
The audit revealed that 12 hours per week of skilled administrative labour was being spent on robot work. Every dollar of automation investment was prioritised against a clear, quantified baseline of time and error cost.
Trust Account Automation
Trust accounts are the most compliance-sensitive data in any law firm. We built this automation first — under maximum scrutiny — using a Django middleware layer (the Legal Practice Portal) that provides an immutable, queryable audit trail for every transaction. LEAP webhooks trigger the pipeline; the Portal maps transaction types to Xero codes, applies GST rules, and writes a permanent audit log before pushing to Xero.
- LEAP webhook triggers on every trust account transaction with schema validation
- Django middleware enforces transaction-type mapping, GST rules, and journal entry formatting
- Immutable audit log written before any data reaches Xero — exceeding Victorian Legal Services Board requirements
- End-to-end confirmation webhook closes the audit loop for every transaction
Key Outcome
Friday trust account reconciliation reduced from 4 hours of manual CSV reformatting to a 20-minute review of an automated reconciliation report. The firm's external auditor described it as 'the most rigorous trust automation I have seen in a mid-tier firm.'
Invoice & Disbursement Pipeline
Extending the proven trust account pattern, the invoice and disbursement pipeline eliminated the 'type everything twice' problem. Every LEAP invoice finalisation triggers an automated Make.com scenario that extracts line items, maps them to Xero account codes, and creates draft invoices — all with intelligent error handling that flags unmappable items for human review instead of silently dropping them.
- 80-120 invoices per month processed end-to-end without manual re-entry
- 200+ disbursement entries per month with automated cost coding into Xero
- Error-handling architecture: failed mappings flag for human review — no silent drops
- Governance dashboard showing execution counts, error rates, and time-saved calculations
Key Outcome
Zero data entry errors in six months and over 1,800 automated transactions. The office manager's loaded cost rate puts annual labour savings at approximately $31,200 — the project paid for itself in under four months.
Client Intake & Governance
The final phase automated new client onboarding end-to-end: matter creation in LEAP triggers automated contact creation in Xero (with deduplication), Microsoft Graph API updates for email distribution lists, automated engagement letter delivery, and a Slack notification to the internal team. A governance dashboard provides real-time visibility into pipeline health and time reclaimed.
- New matter setup time reduced from 15 minutes to under 2 minutes
- Automated Xero contact creation with intelligent deduplication logic
- Email distribution list updates via Microsoft Graph API
- Governance dashboard with daily/weekly/monthly automation metrics and trust account reconciliation status
Key Outcome
12 hours per week reclaimed from manual data entry — the office manager now spends Friday afternoons on practice management strategy. The automation has processed over 600 invoices and 1,200+ disbursement entries with zero trust account discrepancies.
Full Case Study
Dive into the complete story — from challenge through deployment to measurable results.
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