In this solo presentation, Linda Artesani (Artesani Accounting & The Proper Trust) outlines the unique accounting and operational challenges faced by immigration law firms and offers practical solutions. She emphasizes the high‑volume, repetitive nature of immigration transactions and the prevalence of progress billing, recommending Gravity Legal (integrated with LeanLaw) for handling incremental payments and trust requests. The talk covers cash‑handling and trust‑accounting workflows, the importance of robust accounts‑receivable processes, and the need for clear staff roles, permissions, and checks‑and‑balances—especially when multiple team members (attorneys, paralegals, admins, receptionists) interact with the same matter. Artesani advocates using QuickBooks Online Advanced to enforce user‑level access, preventing duplicate work and ensuring accurate tracking of cash, trust, and revenue. She also highlights the significance of staff retention strategies, flexible work arrangements, and comprehensive metric tracking (AR aging, time‑keeper profitability, marketing spend) to maintain a profitable, smoothly‑running immigration practice. The presentation concludes with a call to implement these workflows and tools to support the compassionate work of immigration attorneys.
Chapters
Hi there, my name is Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting and The Proper Trust, and this week we're diving into another practice area and it's going to be immigration law. Immigration firms do have a lot of special things that are different than other law firms and things that we really need to tackle to have a profitable, well-run firm that runs like a smooth, smooth-oiled machine, one that all the pieces work together because there's a lot of working parts. This week is all about immigration firms, and there's a lot of similarities with family law that we did last week. Large volume of transactions, a lot of transactions for the same exact same amount. Immigration firms, you tend to see more processes where there's an amount billed and then it's paid over time, like progress billing. That's something that you really want to handle, and I think that the best way to handle that is using Gravity Legal. Gravity is the only one that I know of that handles those payments along the way. They also will do a trust request. So those are the things you want to look into. I like LeanLaw for immigration firms because of the volume. It's a lot of hands in there. You've got a huge staff. Usually have attorneys, you'll have legal assistants, you'll have paralegals, admins, receptionists. All these people are other touch points along the way inside of the immigration firm. They might all be handling— a good part of them might be handling the money. So you want to handle the money in the door. You'll find that there's cash transactions that might be occurring. We see sometimes that there's a lot of uncollected accounts receivable. So you really want to make sure that the workflow is in place, that you're able to collect on the accounts receivable and track that money along the way. If you set up the process where the person comes in the door, you collect the credit card. If it's cash, you collect some kind of a system to get paid as they make their payments along the way. The immigration firms tend to have, like I said, a large, large staff. So you want to make sure that the staff is well taken care of. You don't want a lot of turnover in the firm. Today we're seeing a lot more with, with people working at law firms that, yes, you should compensate them well for sure, but you want to make sure that not only compensation but really giving the employees the ability to work from home or work in the office. This tends to be a practice area where they need to be in the firm. Maybe not the person handling the money, but the people that work on these cases need to be there. There's a lot of foot traffic with an immigration firm. People come in the door. They'll come in and pay cash. They'll come in and pay money to become a US citizen. Some of the stories are heartbreaking. So you really want to be aware that— and the one thing about immigration attorneys, they have the biggest hearts. So they're a really great group of people to work with. And you find that you want to help them organize. And sometimes they'll come to you with a lot of disorganization within their accounts receivable. They might know on a spreadsheet what was owed, but they really don't have the ability to follow it through. So you want to get the staff in place to be able to track the money as it comes in the door because there's cash. You want to have a good workflow for the cash. You want to be able to really track the money and make sure there's no redundancy in any of the workflows. So if there's 6 or 7 people working on the matter inside the case, you want to make sure that there's nobody doing duplicate work. If there's, you know, receptionist collects the money as the person comes in the door, that needs to be documented. So you need to have that ability to give them— that's what I like about QuickBooks Online Advanced. I can give them that user level that they can only handle that one piece. If you have somebody who needs to be more high level to make sure that the money goes in the right accounts and then gets deposited, we do see with immigration firms a lot of times there's one person sometimes that handles a lot of— they may be the best person speaking English, so a lot of the immigrants will come and give that person money, and that person will come in and set everything up at the law firm for the person to become a citizen. But you'll see that same name over and over again, and it's not really for them in the matter. The actual matter is under a different name. So that's some of the difficulties in tracking this besides the volume, besides the fact that a lot of the transactions are the same amount. You want to be able to track all of these things through the entire workflow through the accounts receivable. That's your biggest piece in working with attorneys that are immigration attorneys. It's very fulfilling. They're one of my— they're probably one of my favorites to work with because they are— they have big hearts. They're really kind and caring, and they really are passionate about what they do. But it's a lot of work, a lot of volume. If you can set it up to be perfectly set up, we like Gravity Legal and LeanLaw because Gravity Legal works within LeanLaw. Gravity will make sure things get booked into trust if they belong into trust. Some of these firms have it go right into accounts receivable because they're actually earning that money at the same time, or maybe they've earned it and then they build later. So we need to make sure that the money is tracked through there. Like I said, cash— if there's cash coming in the door, there's a good cash handling workflow with whoever's in charge, and there's checks and balances there. Those are the things we really look at when we look at working with attorneys in this particular practice area of immigration. So lots of volume. You will need QuickBooks Online Advanced. You really need to track trust if it goes into trust. And those are really the most important parts. Of course, getting the metrics. So you want to— since there's a huge volume, you want to be able to track the metrics, track the accounts receivable, track the timekeeper profitability, track these items that are part of inside, track the marketing. Sometimes they have big marketing dollars because there's a lot of money that's spent. to market these firms. So these are the things we really like to track when we're working with immigration firms. I hope that helps. These are things you really want to look at, really want to set up and get good procedures in place to have that profitable law firm working for you seamlessly. These people work so hard. These attorneys work so hard at their job, and everybody in the law firm works really hard. Everybody's working for that good cause. So On that note, I hope that was helpful. Next week we're going to tackle personal injury attorneys, another great practice area where people are really— they're really kind and giving people as well. So hopefully we'll get on to that one next week. And on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now.
