What Custom Fields Can I Add to Clients and Matters, and Can I Filter Reports by Them?

LeanLaw lets you add custom fields to clients and matters, and reporting on Pro plans and above can group by them, turning a field you fill in once into a filter you can apply across every report you run afterward.

Why a field is only as useful as the report behind it

A custom field nobody can report on is just a note. You add one so you can later group, filter, or total invoices, time entries, or matters by that value — recording the information is only the first half of the job. Before adding a field, the more useful question is what you want a report to eventually show split out by, referral source, practice niche, insurance carrier, whatever matters to your firm, and whether that grouping is worth maintaining on every new client and matter going forward, not just the ones you’re thinking about today. Firms that skip this step tend to end up with fields nobody remembers the purpose of a year later, filled in inconsistently because the reporting payoff was never clear to the people doing the data entry.

How a field becomes a filter

Once a field exists on a client or matter, LeanLaw can use it the same way it already groups data by attorney or by matter: as another axis to sort a report on, and LeanLaw’s Masterclass session on custom fields covers the feature in more depth. That’s the mechanism. A field is metadata attached to a record, and a report is a way of grouping records by whatever metadata they share. Adding the field is the smaller task; deciding it’s worth maintaining on every relevant record from day one is what determines whether the report still holds up six months later.

Custom fields versus the fields already built in

LeanLaw already groups reports by things every firm tracks anyway: attorney, matter, practice area, plus however invoices are mapped to QuickBooks Online income accounts on the accounting side. A custom field earns its place next to those only when your firm needs to slice data by something that isn’t already a standard part of a client or matter record, something specific enough to your practice that no general legal billing platform would build it in by default. That’s the test worth applying before adding one: is this a grouping every firm in your position would want, in which case it’s probably already covered, or is it particular to how your firm actually operates.

A worked example

Say a firm adds a referral-source field to every new client, tagging each one as an attorney referral, an existing client, or marketing. Six months later, a report grouped by that field can show which referral source is producing the matters with the best realization, something the firm couldn’t see before because referral source lived in someone’s memory instead of on the record. The value showed up only because the field existed on every client before the reporting question came up, not after it.

Compare that to a firm that adds the same field only after noticing, informally, that one referral source seems to produce stronger matters. Without six months of consistent tagging behind it, the field can still be added, but the report built from it will only be as reliable as the data going forward, it can’t retroactively fill in what wasn’t recorded on older clients. The lesson generalizes: a custom field is a bet made today on a question you expect to ask later, and the report is only as good as how early and how consistently the firm started answering it.

Who builds the report: you or LeanLaw

This is the question worth asking before you commit to a field: does grouping by it fit inside a standard report structure, or does it need a report built specifically around it? That answer differs by firm and by how unusual the grouping is, and it’s worth confirming for your own situation before you invest in tagging every record going forward, rather than assuming either way.

A field’s usefulness also isn’t fixed at the moment you create it. A referral-source field with a few options might need another two years later as the firm’s marketing changes, or a field that made sense when the firm was smaller might stop being worth maintaining once the categories it captures no longer map to how the firm actually gets work. Treat a custom field the way you’d treat any other piece of firm infrastructure: worth a periodic look at whether it’s still earning the effort it takes to fill in on every new record, not something to set once and forget.

What this depends on

• Whether your reporting need fits a standard grouped report or needs something built around your specific field
• How consistently your team fills in the field on every new client or matter, not just some of them
• Which plan your firm is on, since custom fields and the reporting behind them live on specific tiers, see LeanLaw’s plans for the current breakdown
• How your matter structure syncs with QuickBooks Online and whether it lines up with the grouping you want

Related questions

Is creating custom fields part of the basic package? No. Custom fields and the reporting built around them ship on LeanLaw’s Pro plan and above; the plan comparison lays out the full breakdown.

Are custom reports something we build ourselves, or does LeanLaw build them for us? It depends on whether the grouping you want fits a standard report structure or needs something built around your specific fields, which is worth confirming for your situation before you commit to tagging every record with it.