We're pleased to announce the latest release of Access Legal Case Management, Version 2.16.9.

This update includes various enhancements and bug fixes detailed below. A PDF copy of the release notes can also be found here.

Previously, when dragging an email with attachments into File History, the Letter In attachment entries were incorrectly assigned a time recording value even when the matter's Rate Category designated Letter In as zero-rated. The attachments inherited the parent email's rate rather than having their own rate evaluated against the matter's Rate Category rules.

This has been resolved. Attachment entries created via email drag-and-drop now correctly apply the matter's Rate Category configuration. Where Letter In is marked as zero-rated, attachments will be saved to File History with a value of £0.00 and no time recorded, consistent with manually added Letter In notes and OneOffice behaviour.

A group of related issues has been resolved where email replies sent from ALCM were saving the wrong file note into the case file history. In some cases, the note from a previously sent email was applied instead of the one entered by the user; in others, edits made to the file note in the Chaser popup were not being saved

correctly due to an input event not firing reliably.

Additional fixes prevent an error that occurred when the Chaser note was left empty, and correct an issue in the File History grid where selecting a row could display data from a different record.

Please note: We are still making improvements in the emailing area regarding know issues with sporadic duplicate conversation IDs. When happening, these can also cause problems with the incorrect notes being saved.

The Client tab in ALCM now correctly displays all clients added via the One Office Case File without requiring a manual Edit and Save. Previously, clients added in One Office would not appear in the ALCM Client tab until the case was edited and saved — and each additional client required a separate Edit/Save cycle to appear.

This was caused by commented-out refresh logic, a frontend caching issue preventing data from reloading, and a backend contact count endpoint that did not account for multi-client mode. All three issues have been resolved.

Previously, attempting to delete a File History item associated with a CDS time record would silently skip the deletion and report "1 records Skipped" with no explanation or guidance.

Users will now see a clear warning message stating that the item could not be deleted because it is linked to a CDS time record, and directing them to use the Crime module to delete or amend it. This applies to both single and multi-item deletions. Where multiple items are selected, the CDS-linked warning and any existing billed/posted account warnings can both appear as appropriate.

When a user screen (e.g. [US200]) was called from within a template being executed as part of an [LL] (List Letters) workflow, any data entered by the user into that screen was silently discarded and not saved to the matter record. The same screen worked correctly when opened directly from the workflow menu.

The system now correctly persists any changes made to matter variables within a user screen back to the database when the screen is invoked through the [LL] command flow. Data entered by users will no longer be lost in this scenario.

When converting an Opportunity to a live matter, the Rate Category field could intermittently be left blank — even where a default Rate Category was configured against the relevant work type. This affected a subset of conversions, particularly where no rate table was directly assigned to the specific work type.

The conversion logic now includes an additional fallback step to correctly resolve and apply the Rate Category default during matter creation. Previously, if a work type had no rate table directly configured, the system skipped to client- and system-level fallbacks, which in most cases also had no Rate Category set, resulting in the field being left blank on the new matter. The fix ensures the default Rate Category is reliably carried across for all conversions.

When running a quote for Buying and Selling, selecting a property type (e.g. House or Flat) for one transaction incorrectly deselected the property type chosen for the other. This meant users could not complete a combined Buying and Selling quote without losing one of their selections.

This has been resolved — both property type selections now retain their values independently.

Previously, when column filters were applied to Matter Search results (e.g. filtering by Client Name or Reference), the total result count displayed at the bottom of the screen continued to show the count from the initial keyword search rather than reflecting the filtered set. For example, a search returning 853 matters would still display "853" even after filters had reduced the visible rows to 2.

This has been resolved. The result count at the bottom of the Matter Search screen now updates dynamically to reflect the number of records currently visible after any column filters are applied, ensuring the displayed count always matches what is shown on screen.

Matter Search recognises certain characters such as hyphens and forward slashes as word delimiters, allowing partial term searches to locate compound references (e.g. searching "002" returns "TES001/002"). However, not all apostrophe variants were being handled consistently — specifically, "smart" or curly apostrophes (') were not treated as word breaks in the same way as the standard straight apostrophe (').

This meant that matter references or details containing certain apostrophe types could be missed in search results. Both apostrophe variants are now recognised as word delimiters, consistent with how other special characters are handled.

Resolved an issue where the email displayed in File History could show different content to the version in OneOffice sent items. This occurred when selecting emails in quick succession, causing the viewer to display an incorrect version of the sent email.

The email content shown in File History will now always accurately reflect the sent email.

A fix has been applied to prevent blank, unassociated time entries from appearing in the Time Recording section.

Previously, an intermittent issue could cause a time entry to be created automatically — with no matter, fee earner, date, or note — and its unit count would increment on its own over time without any user interaction. The only resolution was manual deletion from the database.

The auto-save logic for floating time entries has been updated to require a valid matter reference before a record is written to the database. Time entries will now only be created as a result of an explicit user action, and unit values will only change when a user manually enters a value or interacts with the stopwatch timer. No time entry will be saved without a case association.

When a fee earner opened the LegalBricks Online Search Submission Manager and clicked the Refresh button, an error was displayed instead of retrieving the latest pending or completed search orders.

This was caused by the Online Search panel returning in an inconsistent state on refresh — neither fully enabled nor hidden — which triggered a frontend error. The fix ensures the panel initialises correctly on refresh, so clicking Refresh now reliably retrieves and displays the latest search orders from LegalBricks as expected.

When using the "Write Off All" option in the Import Disbursements dialog within a billing request, disbursements were being added to the bill but their values were not being zeroed out as expected. This could result in billing discrepancies and incorrect office balances after posting.

Both frontend and backend changes were required to resolve this, ensuring correct write-off processing and accurate report generation.

Please note: We are aware of a separate issue in both ALCM and OneOffice where writing off individual disbursements is blocked with a warning message. This will be addressed in a future release. We plan to further improve the area by displaying the written-off amount in the Billing Request in File history to match the OneOffice functionality.

When submitting an AML check, users were incorrectly presented with an error and redirected to the client's Documents tab, despite the check having been successfully received and processed by Legal Bricks. This was caused by a change in the Legal Bricks API that returned an empty validations array instead of null on success, which was misinterpreted as a failure.

The validation handling has been updated to correctly treat an empty validations array as a successful submission, ensuring users are no longer shown a false error after submitting an AML check.

Time entries saved but not yet posted in One Office (DPS Financial Director) were incorrectly appearing in ALCM's Ledger Time screen and Unbilled Time reports. This caused discrepancies between One Office and ALCM WIP reporting, leading to inaccurate financial tracking.

Unposted time entries are now correctly excluded from ALCM Unbilled Time reports and the Ledger Time screen. Time entries will only appear in ALCM reports once they have been posted in One Office, ensuring both systems remain consistent.

On Care Proceedings matters, posting an Interim Bill and then recording additional time afterwards caused the Net Profit Costs in the Profit Costs Rendered Report to decrease. This created a discrepancy between the report and the face value of the posted bill. The time was not returned to unbilled WIP — it was effectively lost.

The Billing Guide and Profit Costs Rendered Report now use the immutable net billed amount locked in at the point of posting, rather than a recalculated value that could be affected by subsequent Legal Aid uplift logic. Net Profit Costs on posted Interim Bills will remain consistent and unchanged regardless of any time recorded after billing.

When a bill was raised in ALCM and posted in One Office with a "Billed To" amount differing from the net value of recorded time, the Profit Costs Rendered Report incorrectly displayed the net time value rather than the actual billed amount. Additionally, billed units could appear doubled in the report due to duplicate time references being processed.

Two server-side validations have been introduced to catch data inconsistencies before a bill is saved or printed. The system now verifies that the sum of time and disbursement net amounts matches the bill header net total (within a 0.01 rounding tolerance), and detects duplicate time references that caused unit counts to be inflated. The Profit Costs Rendered Report will now correctly reflect the billed amount and accurate unit totals.

Other Billing Guide & WIP Fixes

This release resolves three issues identified in the billing area:

We’ve fixed some intermittent display issue with the ”Close” button from the “Client” and “Case” creation screens. These were occurring due to some styling clashes now resolved in this release