Lynda ArtesaniLegal Accountant and Data Migration Specialist at The Proper Trust

Client Responsibilities in Legal Accounting #lawfirms #legalaccounting #EngagementLetters

9 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the presenter emphasizes that legal accounting firms must clearly outline client responsibilities and associated deadlines within engagement letters. He explains that while initial cooperation may be smooth, clients can become unavailable during busy periods such as trials, leaving the firm without necessary information to meet its own deadlines. The speaker highlights the need to specify who is responsible for fixing broken bank feeds—typically the client—and who must supply financial statements, noting that without these inputs the accounting work stalls. By spelling out these obligations up front, firms can avoid delays and protect their service delivery timelines.

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Yeah. Another thing that I think is really important when it comes to legal accounting firm working with attorneys is that you need to spell out, and this is a big one, client responsibilities and their deadlines. Because we've had it happen where everybody's all happy in the honeymoon period. Well, they're giving you everything, and then all of a sudden they get busy, they go to trial, whatever happens, and then we're faced with, we want to get your work to you on a specific deadline. We don't have all the pieces we need. And then what do you do? You need to make sure that you have in there, if the bank feed breaks, who's responsible, because they're responsible. And most of these bank feeds, the admin, we don't want that access. That person has to turn it back on. If it's broken, we're a little bit dead in the water on some of these. Sometimes we don't have statements and we are reliant on a client to give us statements. If we have to keep asking for them,