Legal Accountants and CPAs for Law Firms
The books are behind. The trust account has not been reconciled in months. The last real financial statement was a tax return. We see this at most firms we onboard, and it is fixable. Our accountants for lawyers and law firms take over the weekly work. A law firm CPA manages the team. Each month you get an income statement, a balance sheet, and management reports you can make decisions from. You stop being the firm's controller.
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Law Firm Focus
More than 130 law firms nationwide run their accounting with our team: personal injury, family law, criminal defense, estate planning, immigration, employment, and corporate and business practices.
US based team
40 finance professionals working on legal finance, six of them licensed CPAs. The function never rests on one person.
2 times inc. 5000 honoree
Recognized among America’s fastest growing private companies.
Law firm accounting services built around the rules that make legal books different
A law firm accountant works under rules a small-business accountant never meets. Client money in trust is a liability, not revenue. Costs advanced on a contingency case have to be tracked by matter until the case resolves. Our accountants close the books under those rules for more than 130 firms each month.
We are making money, but I do not know if we are managing the firm well.
We understand the accounting complexity of running a law firm
Retainers and settlement funds sit in IOLTA until they are earned or disbursed. Every trust account needs a three-way reconciliation each month: bank balance, trust ledger, and the sum of client ledgers, to the penny. We get pulled into bar audits every year. Our firms pass.
In a contingency practice, the costs you advance on a case come back only when the case resolves. The books have to carry every dollar of it by matter, so you know what each case has cost so far, what is still outstanding, and what the firm is carrying for its clients.
Hourly work bills in arrears, flat fees arrive before the work is done, and co-counsel and referral arrangements split the fee before it reaches you. Revenue, realization, and margin only mean something when the books record each the way it actually happened.
Most reporting errors in a law firm live between the practice management system and the general ledger: a payment posted in one and not the other, a trust transfer that never reached QuickBooks. Closing that gap is part of every month, not a cleanup project.
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Legal accounting that produces statements ready for a leadership meeting
Each month you receive an income statement, a balance sheet, and management reports built around the Critical Four: revenue, gross profit margin, net profit margin, and cash. The statements close on a fixed date and tie to a documented reconciliation of every account.
You never open QuickBooks again.
We run the ledger in QuickBooks Online and reconcile it against the billing, payment, and trust activity in your practice management system, so the numbers your team sees in Clio or Filevine and the numbers on the financial statements are the same numbers. When you want to know what a practice group earned last quarter or what the firm can distribute this month, the answer is in the report, not in a spreadsheet someone has to build.
You run the firm. We run the accounting function.
Inside an accounting engagement, we will:
Record
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every transaction and trust movement each week.
Reconcile
every operating, trust, and credit card account each month.
Review
every reconciliation and the monthly statements for trends, errors, and the entries that need a judgment call.
Report
an income statement, balance sheet, and Critical Four management reports on a fixed monthly schedule, formatted for the people who make decisions.
Every month, your leadership reads the firm through the Critical Four
Revenue
Know where the firm creates value, by practice group, office, and attorney.
Gross Profit Margin
Monitor the ratio of revenue to legal production team labor costs.
Net Profit Margin
Protect the bottom line while revenue and headcount grow.
Cash
Run the firm on a forecast instead of a bank balance.
A structured accounting function, not a bookkeeper you have to supervise
Every accounting engagement at Law Firm Velocity runs on the same repeatable system, so the work does not depend on one person’s memory or availability. You hire us for the books. What you get is closer to a controller-level service: a fixed close calendar, documented reconciliations, and a review layer above the person doing the entries.
Your first 90 days
- Review of your ledger, trust accounts, payroll, and practice management data, and the hand off between them
- Catch-up and cleanup, with every operating and trust account reconciled and the differences documented
- Chart of accounts and matter-cost tracking set up the way a law firm’s statements should read
- First month-end close on the new calendar, with financial statements and Critical Four reports
Your ongoing accounting cadence
Each week
- Transactions categorized in QuickBooks Online
- Questions on new items sent to one person at your firm
Each month
- Reconciliation of every operating, trust, and credit card account
- Three-way IOLTA reconciliation on every trust account, with reports kept for your audit trail
- Close on a fixed date, followed by the income statement, balance sheet, and management reports
An accounting team led by strong legal accountants
Each engagement is run by an accounting manager. Behind them is a team of 40 finance professionals working on legal finance for more than 130 firms every month, so the patterns we see across the profession show up in how your books are kept.
Paul Carlson, CPA
Jane Phillips
Sara Jilek
Jessika Minczuk
Dakota Wynn
Adrienne Harris, CPA
Our current provider records the past. I need someone who helps us make decisions.
You are the default controller
You approve every transaction, chase reconciliations, and explain trust accounting to your tax preparer every spring. That is a controller’s job, and nobody hired you for it.
Your accountant learned law firms from you
A general small-business accountant is good at general small-business accounting. Trust accounting, advanced client costs, and fee splits are a different discipline, and the ledger gets reclassified every April to prove it.
The books are behind
Reconciliations are months out, the trust account has never had a three-way reconciliation, and the last clean set of financial statements was prepared for a tax return.
You cannot trust the numbers
Hiring and marketing decisions are running on numbers nobody would sign.
Frequently asked questions
A legal accountant keeps a law firm's books under the rules that apply to client money and case costs. At Law Firm Velocity that work runs on a fixed calendar. Each week our team records every transaction in QuickBooks Online. Each month we reconcile every operating, trust, and credit card account, run a three-way reconciliation on each IOLTA account, and close the books on a set date. You then receive an income statement, a balance sheet, and management reports built around the Critical Four: revenue, gross profit margin, net profit margin, and cash. The accountant also handles the entries a bookkeeper should not decide alone: partner draws, unearned retainers, fee splits, and the treatment of advanced costs.
Mostly they describe the same thing from different angles: an accounting practice whose clients are attorneys and their firms. One distinction matters. A search for a CPA lawyer or an attorney CPA usually means one professional who holds both licenses and practices tax law. We are the other kind: a CPA led accounting team that keeps the books for law firms. What you are buying is a team that has already seen how trust accounting, advanced costs, and fee splits go wrong at more than 160 firms, so it does not let them go wrong on yours.
Accounting services for law firms at Law Firm Velocity start at $1,200 per month and move with transaction volume, the number of operating and trust accounts, payroll frequency, and the level of controller and CPA review you add. Pricing is a fixed monthly fee rather than hourly billing, so the cost of asking a question is zero.
Compare that to hiring one in-house accountant for law firm work: salary, benefits, software, training on trust accounting, and coverage when they leave. Our fractional CFO service is priced separately, from $2,500 to $8,000+ per month, and it runs on the same books.
Law firm bookkeeping is the transaction layer: categorization, trust ledger maintenance, reconciliations, and the monthly close. Every accounting engagement includes it. The accounting and CPA layer adds what a bookkeeper is not qualified to decide: the tracking and reporting of advanced client costs, trend analysis, partner draw and compensation entries, and entity-level questions.
Most firms that come to us asking for a bookkeeper are describing this layer. The line between the two is not a different team or a different set of books. It is how much judgment sits on top of the entries and who signs off on it.
For monthly books kept current and reconciled, an experienced accountant for law firms is enough, and that is most of the work. You want a CPA involved when a decision carries risk if it is wrong: how advanced client costs are tracked and reported, how the entity and partner compensation are structured, and what the statements will look like to a lender, a buyer, or a bar auditor. Our engagements are built so you get both.
No. We run the monthly accounting, controller review, and, where the firm wants it, the CFO function. At year end your tax preparer receives a clean, reconciled file with advanced costs, trust balances, and partner draws already reconciled and documented, along with a short memo on anything unusual in the year.
Yes. QuickBooks Online stays the ledger, and we reconcile it against the billing, payment, and trust activity in your practice management system: Clio, MyCase, Filevine, PracticePanther, CASEpeer, Smokeball, Actionstep, CosmoLex, Litify, SmartAdvocate, CloudLex, Soluno, and Caret. You keep your billing workflow, and our team keeps the books tied to it. Most reporting errors in a law firm live in the gap between those two systems.
Three-way reconciliation on every trust account, every month: the bank balance, the trust ledger, and the sum of the individual client ledgers must agree to the penny. Differences are investigated and corrected before the month closes, and the reconciliation reports are kept for your audit trail. Operating and trust funds stay separated under your state bar’s rules, and earned fees move out of trust on a documented schedule rather than when someone remembers. State-by-state requirements are collected in our IOLTA resource hub, and the service itself is described on our IOLTA trust accounting page.
Yes, and most engagements start that way. The first 90 days include a review of the ledger, trust accounts, payroll, and practice management data, then catch-up and cleanup: every operating and trust account reconciled, advanced costs tracked by matter, unearned retainers taken out of revenue, and the differences documented rather than plugged. The first month-end close on the new calendar follows.
On a fixed close date you receive an income statement, a balance sheet, a cash summary across operating and trust accounts, three-way reconciliation reports for every trust account, and management reports built around the Critical Four: revenue, gross profit margin, net profit margin, and cash. Where the firm wants it, revenue and gross profit are reported by practice group, office, and attorney. A note covers anything that called for a judgment during the month and what changed as a result. The statements are formatted for a leadership meeting, not just for a tax return.
We support more than 130 firms nationwide across personal injury and contingency practice, family law, criminal defense, estate planning, immigration, employment, and corporate and business law, from solo attorneys to multi-office firms with revenue past $50M.
The rules change by practice area. A contingency firm’s books turn on advanced costs and settlement timing, a family law firm’s on retainer replenishment and realization, and a corporate practice’s on work in progress and client concentration. The chart of accounts and the reports get built to match.
No. Our team is based in the United States and headquartered in Chandler, Arizona, and we keep the books for more than 160 firms in dozens of states. The work happens inside the software your firm already uses, on a fixed schedule of calls, with one point of contact for questions in between. A firm in Boston and a firm in Phoenix get the same close calendar and the same reports.
The first call is a fit conversation, not a pitch. We ask about the firm’s size, billing model, practice mix, systems, and the decisions you are trying to make, and we tell you plainly whether the right level is bookkeeping, controller, or CFO work. Firms that are not a fit hear that on the call, along with what we would do instead.
If it fits, we come back with a written proposal that sets out scope and the monthly fee. Onboarding begins with the review of your systems, data, and financial operations.
Onboarding runs about 90 days and starts the week the proposal is signed. The first weeks are access and review: read-only access to the bank and trust accounts, QuickBooks Online, payroll, and the practice management system, then a review of how each one hands data to the next. The middle of the engagement is catch up and cleanup, documented account by account, with the chart of accounts and matter cost tracking set up the way a law firm's statements should read. The first month end close on the new calendar lands inside the first 90 days, with financial statements and Critical Four reports.
I do not want to babysit a finance person. I want the function handled.
