In this solo presentation, Linda Artesani of Artesani Accounting outlines the distinctive bookkeeping and accounting challenges faced by firms that work with estate planning attorneys. She explains that estate planning matters often span many years, resulting in a high volume of long‑running trust accounts. A special "D" (distribution) account sits beneath the client trust account and holds funds until a court authorizes distribution to beneficiaries and attorneys. Because distributions depend on court timelines, accounts receivable frequently show large 90‑day balances, yet these firms remain highly profitable. Key terminology such as probate, wills, and beneficiaries permeates the books. Artesani stresses the need for meticulous, penny‑accurate trust reconciliations, including zeroing out small residual balances and handling unclaimed property. She recommends robust trust‑tracking software (LeanLaw, Clio) over spreadsheets, and highlights essential KPIs: staff and attorney productivity, class‑based income tracking, and location‑based tax tracking for multi‑state operations. Multi‑state tax compliance requires detailed income‑by‑state reporting to tax professionals. Finally, she warns that data migrations from legacy systems (e.g., PC Law) to modern platforms are labor‑intensive and should be priced accordingly. The talk concludes with an invitation for firms to engage Artesani Accounting for bookkeeping support and a preview of upcoming Clio‑focused content.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. We're all the way up to our last practice area, and this week it's all about estate planning attorneys and what are the bookkeeping and accounting nuances when you are working with an estate planning attorney. When working with an estate planning attorney, you're going to see there are differences, there are similarities, right? Just like all the practice areas. With estate planning attorneys, we tend to see a bigger volume of matters because the matters go on for an extended period of time, much like a personal injury attorney, which is like 3— spans 3 years, 5 years, whatever that is. Estate planning attorneys can go on for even decades. I've seen some really lengthy ins and outs of those accounts. They also have a special account called a D account, like D as in dog, and then that's a distribution account. A lot of times you'll see where maybe there'll be a client trust account, and then you'll have underneath the client trust account, you'll see like Linda Artesani, and then underneath that you'll see the estate of Linda Artesani distribution account. And that's usually where the funds will be held until the court deems that they can be distributed. And once they're distributed, they're distributed to whoever the beneficiary is, and then it's distributed to the attorneys collect at that time. So when you're looking at this type of law firm, don't be alarmed when you open up the open accounts receivable and see a lot of things in the 90-day column. That's caused by the fact that they're waiting on the court to allow them to move the funds and pay themselves. So you're going to see that. Although you will see that these firms tend to be highly profitable. You will see that there's a lot of work going on, a lot of legal work going on, but these types of firms tend to have a bigger increase in their percentages of profitability are much higher. That's something we tend to see. You're going to see some— you'll see some words floated around, or you'll talk, or you'll see them right inside the books: probate, wills, beneficiaries. These are words you're going to see working with estate planning attorneys. It's just part of working with them. You will see a lot of these firms have lengthy lists of matters. It's very heavy-handed in the trust, so you have to really be really diligent about, you know, this is a type of firm that you need a bookkeeper that's really on it and, and to the penny when it comes to that kind of work, because you need to see these things. This trust accounts are big in this type of practice, and you really need to make sure that these are tied back to the penny. You'll see sometimes one of the ways you can help an attorney when you work with these type of law firms is you might log in and see, oh gee, there's a lot of smaller amounts left here on the trust accounts. You might want to talk to the attorney about, you know, getting these accounts to zero, writing them down, and getting that to be in a place where you've got the trust matters cleaned up. Because these go on for so many years, that's when you're going to see that tendency of little bits left behind, and you really want to help them clean the matters up. Sometimes it involves you getting the what's there sent on to the unclaimed money for the state because they can't reach the people that are behind all of this. But that's probably the biggest things you're going to see in this type of practice area overall. Lots of, lots of matters, lengthy and long trust ledgers. You're going to open up the client ledgers, going to go on for years, ins and outs. You want to make sure they're balanced. I definitely want software in this one because you can't really get away with it. You want to have Spreadsheets aren't manageable. You really wanna have a good robust system like a LeanLaw or Clio where you're able to track the trust matters. For KPIs, we have done multitude of these. We've done some, they tend to have larger staffs. You might wanna do some of the staff productivity ones, timekeeper productivity, attorney productivity. Marketing tends to be a little bit low-key. It's not as much as the personal injury attorneys. So we don't really spend a lot of time in marketing, but that's usually, the ones you want to look at is firm productivity. We like to use class tracking. Class tracking is kind of a must if the firm is bigger. You want to track the income by attorney, by class. Still location tracking. We're really kind of hammering that one home because if you're working in multiple states, some of these firms are quite large and they work in multiple states. And now some of the states are mandating that you have to track it by state and sometimes pay taxes to a state that maybe you're not physically in and doing the work in, but they're making you pay for that. We're finding that to be a part of our tax working with a tax professional, we need to give those lists over to the tax person of where the income was generated from. I think that's probably all the considerations you need to think about when you're working with this type of firm. When it comes to data migration, if you're considering doing some data migration, taking a client off of like a PC Law and moving them over to a LeanLaw or Clio QuickBooks scenario, you really want to make sure you charge a lot for it because some of these migrations, because of the length and the size of the trust matters, a lot of that's manual and you have to follow up. Some of it you can push out into, you know, CSV, but sometimes it's a lot of manual work around doing a data migration on this type of firm. I hope that's helpful. If you have any questions or if you're looking, you're in a— you work in this type of firm or you are a partner in this kind of firm and you want to work with a firm like ours that will help you even help your bookkeeper on staff do some of the financial strategy behind that firm, reach out. We'd love to help you. If you need an accounting firm, we do this work. So on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. We're gonna shift gears in the month of June and really start to shift over to working with Clio. And we're gonna dive into Clio and how to set your firm up and how to work within the platform and what some of the things we've discovered as we work through it. One of the software that we use here at our firm. And I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now. Bye.
