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Your trust account either passes a bar audit or it doesn't. There's no middle ground.
Most attorneys assume their trust accounting is fine.
The ones who find out otherwise find out the hard way - during an audit, a complaint, or a reconciliation that won't balance no matter how many times they check it.
Find out if your trust account is clean
"My bookkeeper handles my IOLTA."
We hear this often. And sometimes it's true - sometimes a bookkeeper is handling it correctly. But here is what most attorneys don't know:
Most bookkeepers - even excellent general bookkeepers - do not understand legal trust accounting requirements. They don't know what a 3-way reconciliation is. They don't know how to catch a mismatch between client ledger balances and the bank statement. They have never heard of a bar compliance audit and have no idea what one looks for.
This is not a criticism of bookkeepers. Trust accounting for law firms is a specialized skill that most accounting professionals were never trained in.
If your bookkeeper has never proactively flagged a trust account discrepancy, never produced a reconciliation showing all three records matching, and never mentioned bar compliance - the question is not whether your trust account has errors. The question is whether anyone has been checking.
What's actually at risk
A trust accounting violation is not a fine you pay and move on from. It is one of the few things that can result in disbarment. State bar associations treat commingling, misappropriation, and recordkeeping failures as serious ethical violations - and when they investigate, they are looking at every transaction, every client balance, and every reconciliation record.
The attorneys who get into the most trouble are not the ones who stole from clients. They are the ones who had sloppy trust accounting, assumed it was being handled, and never looked closely enough to know it wasn't.
A missing $200 can trigger the same audit as a missing $20,000.
The thing about trust accounting compliance is that it does not care how good a lawyer you are, how long you've been practicing, or how much your clients love you. The records either balance or they don't.
The attorneys who get into the most trouble are not the ones who stole from clients. They are the ones who assumed someone else was watching.
What "3-way" actually means - and why all three have to match
Here's the short version:
Your IOLTA account has three separate records that should always tell the same story.
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The bank statement shows what the bank says is in the account.
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The client ledger shows what each client's funds add up to.
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The trust account balance in your books shows what your accounting software believes is there.
All three should match. Exactly.
When they don't - and in our experience, they often don't when we first look at a new client's records - it means one of three things: a transaction was recorded incorrectly, a client's funds were misapplied, or there's an error that has been compounding for months without anyone catching it.
A 3-way reconciliation is the process of comparing all three records, finding where they diverge, and correcting every discrepancy until they agree.
It is not complicated to understand. It is just tedious, requires legal trust accounting knowledge, and has to be done every single month without exception.
That is what we do.
What changes when your trust account is properly reconciled every month
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You become the kind of attorney who can open a bar audit notice without your heart stopping - because you already know your records are clean.
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You go from hoping your trust accounting is correct to knowing it is.
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You stop being exposed to a risk you didn't know you were carrying.
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You become someone whose license is protected by a system, not by luck.
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You walk into client meetings knowing that every dollar in your trust account is exactly where it's supposed to be.
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You stop losing sleep over the reconciliation that never quite balanced - because it now does, every month, before you even think to check.
This service is not about compliance paperwork. It is about becoming an attorney who is never surprised by their own trust account.
This is for you if...
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You have an IOLTA account and you cannot confidently say when it was last reconciled to all three records
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Your bookkeeper does your trust accounting but has never specifically mentioned a 3-way reconciliation
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You have noticed your trust balance and your client ledger don't always agree and you've been hoping it resolves itself
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You are switching bookkeepers and want to know the state of your records before you hand them off
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A client has raised a question about their trust funds and you don't have a clean record to reference
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You are preparing for a bar audit or you have received a notice and you need to know exactly what your records show
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You have been doing your own trust accounting in a spreadsheet and you are not confident it is complete
If any of these sound like your situation, this is not optional. It is urgent.
What happens when you work with us
Every month, our team reconciles your IOLTA account across all three records: bank statement, client ledger, and trust account balance. We find every discrepancy. We trace it to its source. We correct it. And we give you a clean, documented reconciliation report you can hand to a bar auditor if you ever need to.
If we find errors when we start - and if you've never had a proper 3-way reconciliation, we almost certainly will - we propose a plan to backlog systematically until your records are accurate.
You also get direct access to our team when questions come up. Trust accounting throws surprises. We are here for them.
What this means for you:
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You have documentation that proves compliance, ready at any time
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You are no longer the person responsible for catching trust account errors - we are
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Every client's funds are tracked at the matter level, so you always know whose money is whose
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If something is off, you hear about it from us - not from the bar
Questions we hear most often
What other attorneys are saying
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The fastest way to know where your trust account stands
Book a call with our team. In a single conversation we can review what your current trust accounting looks like, tell you whether there are discrepancies, and give you a clear picture of what it would take to get your records clean and keep them that way.
No obligation. No lecture. Just clarity.
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Not ready to talk yet?
Download the free Trust Account Guide, a plain-language walkthrough of what compliant IOLTA records look like and what bar auditors check first.