December 12, 2022
What’s New
- We introduced a new pre-built Matter Spend v Budget Report making it easier to report out on how your organization has controlled and reduced spend by utilizing matter budgets.
- On the Invoice Review Page, we've added the "Submitted Date" along the left pane to make it easier to see when the law firm submitted the invoice to Brightflag.
- We've made interacting with your Reports easier by introducing the HHMMSS timestamp. This new timestamp will now be available in all report headings from the Report Builder and Report Scheduler.
Bug Fixes
- We resolved a minor bug on the Invoice Review page where some icons were not displaying correctly.
- Along with fixing some bugs, we made minor changes to how the invoices are displayed on the Legal Ops Dashboard, making it easier to view invoices "Awaiting My Review" on the screen.
- Across the platform, we identified and resolved several bugs to improve the overall user experience.
November 17, 2022
What’s New
- On the Accruals review page, we've added a new column, "Latest Invoice" to provide users with a hyperlink to quickly view the latest invoice submitted.
- On the Accruals review page, we've also added more information to the drop-down for each line item:
- Submitted Date
- Approved by (only displays for approved accruals)
- Approved Date (only displays for approved accruals)
- We've improved some visual displays and functionality in Report Builder to improve consistency with other features of Brightflag.
Bug Fixes
- When attempting to upload an invoice, we resolved a small issue where some users received an error message incorrectly.
- We resolved a handful of bugs across the Brightflag application to improve the overall user experience.
November 04, 2022
What’s New
- We've improved the user experience of the Accruals review page to make it easier to view current & previous accrual submissions.
- For Brightflag Workspace, we've made it easier to find related workrooms by adding the ability to link a child workroom to a records workroom.
- We've renamed the Accruals tab in our Legal Ops Dashboard to "Accruals Not Submitted" to better reflect the content within the tab.
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In the All Matters report in Report Builder, we've added a new filter called "Matter Name," allowing you to filter the results to a specific matter or set of matters.
- For added convenience, we've added a new search bar in the User Management section of Admin Settings, making it easier & faster to search for a specific user.
- It is now mandatory to include a comment when manually adjusting an invoice. This will provide greater clarity to law firm users and avoid unnecessary confusion.
- We've improved the user experience on the Invoice search page by showing all invoices as the default, rather than automatically applying a filter for pending invoices.
- On the Invoice search page, for the sake of clarity, the "Adjustment total" column has been renamed to "Adjusted total."
- We've made some updates to the invoice rejection notification emails to make them clearer for end users.
- The Matter Groups functionality is now available to all users, whereas previously, only admin users had access.
Bug Fixes
- In certain situations, adjustments made to invoices were not properly reflected on in-app spend dashboards and budget overviews. This has been fixed. Please note that the Report Builder reports typically used to send data to accounts payable systems were not affected by this issue.
- We resolved an issue where accrual cut-off dates were saved incorrectly. This only impacted a small number of accruals across the system.
- We fixed a bug that was causing certain scheduled reports to return errors.
September 28, 2022
What’s New
- We've made interacting with your Matter Budgets easier by introducing our Budgets API. You can now create, read, update and delete matter budgets from your preferred application.
- We've launched a BETA for selected clients to use & test our new Matter Spend vs Budget report. After completing this BETA period, keep an eye out for details of the general release.
Bug Fixes
- Occasionally, some reports were missing or omitting some data in the report results. We’ve implemented a fix to prevent this from occurring again.
- We have improved the user experience on our Legal Ops Dashboard to view invoices by the current reviewer.
- Under certain conditions, some vendors incorrectly received an error message when uploading timekeepers.
- On the Matter Details page, we've improved the user experience and resolved some small visual bugs.
September 7, 2022
What’s New
- On the invoice search page, filters are now set to show all invoices within your access permissions by default. You can change this to only show invoices you need to review by clicking “awaiting my review”.
- We've added an Accruals tab to the Legal Ops Dashboard, giving you faster insight into any accruals pending review.
Bug Fixes
- Under certain conditions, some reports were not sent out to users as planned. We also fixed some other bugs in reporting.
- We resolved an issue where some invoice notification emails were not sent to approvers.
- In some situations, users received an API error where no issue occurred.
August 17, 2022
What’s New
- On the invoice search page, you can now select to convert the monetary invoice amounts to your company's default currency by clicking on the Convert to XX toggle on the top right side of the screen, making it easier to view invoices in the one currency.
- We’ve added the option to sort the fields/columns on the invoice search page, making it easier to sort the data by the most important data points.
- For greater visibility into the last time an invoice status was changed, we’ve added a new field/column to the invoice search page, Last Status Change. This field/column provides you with the last date & time the invoice status was updated.
- For added convenience, the Report Builder now populates your email address by default when you choose “send by email address.”
- To make it easier to view allocated amounts, we’ve added actual allocated amounts to the Invoice Report.
Bug Fixes
- In some situations, users could not clear dates from a matter. This has now been resolved.
- We’ve improved the user experience by changing the symbol's color to remove a stage approver for admins, as the symbol was the same as a background, thus removing it from view.
- On rare occasions, reports were missing or omitting some data in the report results. We’ve implemented a fix to prevent this from occurring again.
- Resolved an issue in which some users received the “Pending Invoices Reminder” email when they had no pending invoices to review/action.
July 27, 2022
What’s New
- You’ve always been able to schedule reports to run on a set frequency, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. Now you can also schedule reports to run on a specific day of the month (e.g., on the third day of every month) or on the last day of the month. These options are particularly useful for supporting the month-end close.
- You can now export the results from each tab of the Legal Operations Dashboard to an Excel spreadsheet, making it easy to manipulate the data and share it with other users, including non-Brightflag users.
- An all-new Reporting API can facilitate integrations with data warehouses and business intelligence tools like Power BI and Tableau. This is in addition to the existing option to export reporting data to a secure FTP server.
- We’ve renamed financial budgets as Cost Center Budgets. As part of this change, we improved the user experience by aligning the terminology and color palate used for cost center budgets with those used for matter budgets.
Bug Fixes
- On rare occasions, reports were missing certain data fields for certain results. We’ve fixed a handful of bugs to prevent this from happening.
- When saving certain report types, the date type filter was not being remembered. This has been fixed so reports always use the chosen date type.
- The Download Invoice button on the invoice review screen wasn’t working for certain invoices. This has been fixed.
June 2022
Internet Explorer Deprecation
In accordance with Microsoft deprecating internet explorer (IE) we are ending support of IE July 1, 2022. If any of your vendors are still using IE please remind them that effective July 1, they will need to move to a new browser.
Legal Operations Dashboard Beta
The Legal Operations Dashboard is now in beta. This new Dashboard will provide visibility for Admin users into the key items that require your attention, such as Invoices to Review, Blocked Invoices and Timekeeper Rates. Please reach out to your CSM if you’d like to enable the new Legal Operations Dashboard in your account.
Coming Soon: Invoice Search 🔎
Efficient invoice review is essential for saving time. A revamped invoice search page is one part of a series of upgrades coming your way! If you would like early access, reach out to your company’s CSM.
May 2022
Product Update - Billing Periods in Budgets 🧾
Date types are important, especially for your finance team. You can now choose whether your matter budgets are based on invoice dates (the date the invoice is issued) or the billing period (the dates within which the work is carried out. Read more about it here.
April 2022
New Report Builder Rollout 
Our beta testing program has now been completed and we'll soon begin transitioning customers to the new Report Builder interface in phases. Your Customer Success Manager will be in contact shortly to let you know the exact timeline for your transition, but please reach out preemptively with any questions.
More Coming to Matter Budget Charts 
More enhancements are coming your way following last month’s Matter Budgeting update, including the ability to view charts according to billing period (rather than invoice date) and filter results into a custom date range.
As a reminder, the Brightflag Help Center is already full of detailed guides and video tutorials ready to point your budgeting workflows in the right direction. And, as always, don’t hesitate to ask your Customer Success Manager for assistance along the way.
March 2022
Matter Budgets Are Here 🎉
The wait is over and its time to start budgeting!
- Visualize matter budgets the way you need
- Split your matter budget out by vendor and capture an internal budget
- Enjoy seamless interaction between your top-down budgets and your rolled-up matter budgets
Check out our help center for video and written tutorials.
Join our Legal Service Requests Beta
Join our Legal Service Requests Beta to have a smarter “front door” for your legal department in 2022. You can still access our new Legal Service Requests solution for free through the end of June.To get started, please contact your Customer Success Manager.
February 2022
Brightflag Workspace 🤝 Gmail
Legal Service Requests
Eager to install a smarter “front door” for your legal department in 2022? You can still access our new Legal Service Requests solution for free through the end of March. To get started, please contact your Customer Success Manager or feel free to reach out to our product owner Ciaran Gough directly.
January 2022
Introducing Brightflag’s new Legal Service Request Module
Forget the days of searching for legal service requests in multiple areas and spending even more time assigning them. Brightflag’s latest innovation offers corporate legal departments a powerful way to centralize the intake, triage requests, and understand the demand for legal services across the business.
The Legal Service Requests module is a fully integrated part of the Brightflag Legal Operations Platform and is available in Beta immediately to all Brightflag customers at no additional cost through March 2022.
To learn more about Brightflag’s Legal Service Request, join us Thursday, January 20th at 2pm EST where we will deep dive into the module.
Coming Soon: Report Builder
Our new Report Builder has launched in beta format. We are looking forward to providing all customers with a live demo of all the new exciting functionality that you have been asking for at the webinar next month. We will then start to roll out the features to all of our customers in the coming months.
Coming Soon: NEW Workspace Features
Brightflag Workspace is excited to share that in the coming weeks, we will be adding a Workspace Tools App and Gmail sidebar integration to our existing list of exciting features. Not only will these features improve productivity by enabling in-product document editing, but also make importing files and emails to a workroom from GSuite quick and easy. Be on the lookout for an update around these releases soon!
Brightflag's #LegalOps podcast: In-House Outliers
In this week’s episode, Alex interviews Brenda Hansen and Liz Lugones from UpLevel Ops. Brenda and Liz both share how they got started in their legal operations journey. They also share the importance of mentorship in their careers, and what it takes for legal operations professionals to be successful in 2022.