LEAP integration checklist for Melbourne law firms

LEAP is the practice-management spine for most Australian small and mid-size law firms. The integration questions firms ask before extending it are the same six every time: where the matter list lives, how trust accounting reconciles, where time entries originate, what happens to documents, who owns conflict-check data, and how intake sits on top. We have published this checklist so Melbourne practice managers can run the audit themselves. Six honest answers usually tell us whether the firm needs middleware or a sharper LEAP rollout.

What six questions should you answer before any LEAP work?

Before any integration partner runs a quote, the firm needs answers to six questions in writing. Most firms cannot answer them on the day. That is fine. The audit is the work.

1. Where does the canonical matter list live? In LEAP, in a parallel spreadsheet, or split across both with the partner deciding by habit?
2. Where do time entries originate? Inside LEAP, in Outlook calendar entries, on paper, or in a separate timer app the lawyer trusts more?
3. How does trust accounting reconcile today? Manually each month, or against a bank feed inside LEAP?
4. What happens to documents? NetDocuments, SharePoint, the lawyer’s Outlook, the desktop folder named “Smith Matter Final v3”, or some combination?
5. Who owns the conflict-check data? LEAP’s contact database, a shared spreadsheet, or a partner’s memory?
6. How does intake actually run end to end? Web form, phone, referral, conflict check, AML KYC, engagement letter, file open. Where does each step happen and who picks up the next one?

The honest answer to most of these at most firms is “all of the above.” A new enquiry might come in through three channels in the same week. Time entries might be split between LEAP, the lawyer’s diary, and a Word doc that only gets entered on Friday afternoon. None of this is unusual. It is what happens when LEAP rolled out two years ago against a workflow the firm had been running for fifteen.

These questions matter because every integration we have ever built either resolves them or breaks against them. A firm that cannot say where the canonical matter list lives cannot integrate LEAP cleanly with anything else, because the integration will keep losing the argument with whichever system the partner secretly trusts more. The shape of the answers is what determines whether the firm ends up wanting middleware that connects LEAP to the rest of the practice or a sharper LEAP rollout instead.

The audit takes a practice manager about three hours. We have done it for firms who paid us for it and firms who did it themselves and emailed the answers across. Either way, it pays for itself before the first integration line of code.

Where should matter data live: LEAP, document store, or both?

The most common LEAP integration question is the matter-data one. LEAP holds the matter ID, the client link, the responsible lawyer, and a chunk of the workflow metadata. It does not hold the documents. It does not hold the working files. It does not hold the email thread that explains the scope.

Firms answer this in four common shapes:

LEAP as the matter spine, NetDocuments as the document store. The cleanest separation. Matter IDs live in LEAP, every document carries the matter ID as metadata, and a NetDocuments workspace gets created when LEAP creates the matter. The integration creates the workspace automatically so the lawyer never has to remember the naming convention. This is the shape we recommend for most firms above twenty lawyers.

LEAP as both, with NetDocuments retired. Works for smaller firms whose document complexity is mostly correspondence and a handful of templates. LEAP’s document handling is enough. Saves a licence fee. The trade-off is that LEAP’s document search and version control are weaker than the dedicated tools, and once the firm grows past forty matters open at once, the limitation starts costing time.

SharePoint as the document store, LEAP as the matter spine. Common when the firm runs Microsoft 365 across the practice and does not want a separate document tool. The integration cost is higher because SharePoint’s matter-shaped metadata model has to be built. Most firms running this shape have a partner who is already deep in Microsoft tooling and an IT person who can keep the SharePoint structure honest. Firms without that person end up with documents scattered across personal SharePoint sites within a year.

Documents in everyone’s Outlook. Not a shape we recommend. It is what most firms have today before they call us. The integration question is how to migrate out of it, not how to integrate with it. The boring answer is that the migration takes longer than anyone wants, because every partner has a folder structure they invented in 2014 and refuses to touch.

The deciding factor is usually the firm’s growth shape. A firm that is going to add two partners and ten lawyers in the next three years is in a different conversation than a four-partner shop holding steady. We say so honestly when we run the diagnostic. If you are not going to grow, the simplest shape is the right shape.

Where does trust accounting automation break in a LEAP integration?

Trust accounting is the part of the integration where the cost of getting it wrong is regulatory rather than operational. Legal Profession Uniform Law obligations and the Victorian Legal Services Board audit requirements sit on top of whatever the firm has built. What the board wants to see at audit is a three-way reconciliation that runs on a schedule and an evidence trail that survives review. Cleverness in the integration is irrelevant if the evidence trail does not hold up.

Most LEAP integrations break trust automation at three predictable points.

The first is the bank-feed reconciliation. LEAP’s bank feeds work cleanly when the trust account is at a major bank with a supported feed. They get noisy when the firm runs a smaller bank, when the feed reconnects monthly because of an auth refresh, or when the bank’s feed lags by two days. We have seen firms reconciling a feed they thought was real-time and finding out at audit time that three days of trust receipts had been missing from the LEAP view. The fix here is boring. A reconciliation step that compares LEAP’s trust ledger against the bank statement directly and raises a flag when they disagree, run on a schedule the practice manager actually trusts.

The second is the controlled-money tracking. Controlled money sits beside the general trust account and follows different rules. LEAP supports it. Most firms set it up wrong the first time, because the practice manager who configured LEAP was deep in three other system rollouts that month. The integration does not fix the configuration. It just inherits whatever LEAP was told. We check this on day one of any integration job because half the time the trust workflow needs cleaning up before automation makes sense at all.

The third is the matter-to-trust link. Trust receipts are tied to a matter. If the matter list in LEAP has stale records, duplicates, or matters that should have been closed eighteen months ago, the trust receipts get linked to the wrong row. The reconciliation still balances. The audit fails because the matter does not exist. This is where the matter-data question from the first H2 cashes out into real money.

The honest framing is that trust automation is downstream of trust hygiene. If the firm’s trust workflow is wobbly, automating it makes the wobble run faster. We have walked away from automation work where the right answer was four weeks of cleanup first. Most firms are grateful for the call once the audit week comes around.

Document workflow without losing the privilege chain

The document side of a LEAP integration looks straightforward and rarely is. The complication is privilege. A document that was attorney-client privileged needs to stay privileged through every system it passes through. The metadata that proves the privilege boundary has to travel with the file.

Three rules carry across every Melbourne law firm we have integrated.

The matter ID is the join key, not the file name. A document called “Smith engagement letter v3.docx” is unfindable a year later. A document with metadata saying matter 24-1187, document type engagement letter, version 3, author SF, can be found by the partner three years later, by the auditor, and by the new associate who has never seen the file before.

Email-to-matter routing has to be deliberate. Outlook is where lawyers actually live. The integration that drops emails into the matter folder by sender address gets the easy half right. The hard half is the email from a third party, mid-thread, where only the subject line tells you which matter it belongs to. Our pattern is a confirmation step: the integration suggests a matter from the subject and sender, and the lawyer confirms with one click. Less elegant than full automation. Far fewer wrong-matter mistakes.

Version control is not the same as backup. LEAP retains the file. SharePoint retains the file. NetDocuments retains the file. None of them, by default, retain a clean record of who edited which version when, in a way that survives the next document going through three partners with different naming habits. A real version model has to be designed in, not assumed because the document store has versioning enabled.

The privilege chain breaks when a document moves between systems and loses one of these three. It is rarely a malicious break. It is the document landing in a personal SharePoint site because the integration failed silently overnight and the lawyer dragged a copy out of email to keep working. By the time anyone notices, six months of edits have happened in the wrong place.

When firms outgrow LEAP’s matter-shaped contact model, especially around partner-side document sharing, our client and staff portals work covers the partner-portal side. That is a separate decision from the LEAP integration itself. Most firms run both: LEAP as the internal spine, a branded portal as the partner-facing layer.

What should a LEAP integration partner ask you before quoting?

The last test of an integration partner is the questions they ask before quoting. Most quote off the firm’s tool list and a vague description of the workflow. The good ones run the audit first.

The questions you should expect to be asked, and the integration partners who skip them are quoting blind:

• How many matters are open right now, and how many were open this time last year?
• Which of your partners refuses to use LEAP, and what do they use instead?
• When was the last trust audit, and what did it flag?
• How many of your active contacts in LEAP are duplicates? When did the practice manager last run the dedup?
• Which workflow does the firm care about most: intake, matter management, billing, or reporting?
• What happened to the last firm-wide tech rollout, and which partner remembers it most painfully?

These are practice-management questions. The integration partner who skips them delivers a build that ignores the political reality of the firm and gets bypassed by the senior partner within a quarter. We have inherited those builds. They are expensive to fix because the data flow looks correct but the lawyers are doing the work somewhere else.

For firms whose intake genuinely outgrows LEAP’s contact model, the conversation moves into custom CRM development territory. That is a different shape of project. LEAP stays as the matter and trust spine; the CRM layer handles intake, conflict checks against a richer contact graph, and the partner approval gates LEAP was never built to model. The signal is usually that the firm is losing leads in intake faster than the practice manager can document why.

The starting point is honest. Most Melbourne firms we sit down with are one good audit away from knowing whether they need a real integration build, a sharper LEAP rollout, or a separate intake layer beside LEAP. The audit is the cheap step. We run it on a fixed price as part of the systems diagnostic for law firms, and most practice managers leave with a written document they can hand to the partner committee. The next step from there is whichever option makes the firm boring to run.