Injury Lawyer Accounting

07/28/2022

Is Your Bank Responsible When Financial Fraud Occurs?





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When is the bank responsible for fraudulent checks cashed. We have seen some horror stories at law firms. You need to have safeguards in place. Interested if anybody has their own story.

07/25/2022

What are the key metrics?

Three main business problems for a personal injury lawyer are picking up cases, funding the cases and waiting for the settlement. You must measure these numbers so you can manage them and work to improve your finances. Your cash flow is dependent on it. A personal injury law firm has business metrics to watch just like any other business.

Client acquisition
Cost of acquiring a client – This includes advertising and marketing personnel
Average fee per client
Industry average of at least 6-1 is a minimum goal
Funding the client case
Average client cost advanced
Timing of the revenue cycle
Case acquisition date
MMI date
Demand goes out
Settlement
Tracking all of the above are the key metrics for a personal injury lawyer. If you achieve certain benchmarks for the above numbers everything else will take care of itself. Focus on the things you can control rather than just looking at a P & L that’s months old. Use technology to capture the information, measure it and then you can affect changes for improvement. Peter Drucker the renowned father of business management said, “What gets measured, gets managed”. Furthering this statement is “What gets managed, can be improved”.

Find out what other personal injury lawyers like yourself are thinking.

Click here and answer 3 questions about your numbers. We will share the results with everyone who responds.

An example of the above would be a firm that has an average client acquisition cost of $1,000. This would be the amount spent on advertising divided by the number of cases secured. Let’s say the firm’s average fee is $10,000. The ratio of fees to acquisition would be 10-1. This is a good number. The numbers that can be measured and managed are the amount of leads. Can you improve the advertising effectiveness, etc? Can you improve your conversion ratio? How many of the leads do you close. You may break this down into types of cases if your practice varies.

How much capital is required to fund each case. If the firm in question expends an average of $2,000 on each case, it would mean the amount needed to fund 10 cases would be $20,000. Another important factor would be how long is this capital outstanding. If it takes on average 18 months from acquisition to settlement, then the capital is needed for a longer period of time. What can be measured here is the amount of time between MMI and demand. Could this be shortened. Also a close look at your vendors and medical bills could help with cost. You need to know these numbers to effect change. Anecdotal evidence is not enough.





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Three main business problems for a personal injury lawyer are picking up cases, funding the cases and waiting for the settlement.

07/21/2022

A small personal injury law firm had an $80,000 embezzlement by their in house bookkeeper. The bookkeeper was a friend of the family and a trusted employee. The firm was using QuickBooks. The firm had an outside accountant that reviewed the books monthly, reconciled the bank accounts and printed reports for the owner. A few things went wrong. No one looked at the check images or the signatures on the checks. Also, while the client cost advances were recorded in QuickBooks, no one looked at the balances or had any idea of what the totals should be. Client cost advanced is a key metric for any personal injury law firm. The real bad news is that I was the outside accountant.




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A small personal injury law firm had an $80,000 embezzlement by their in house bookkeeper. The bookkeeper was a friend of the family and a trusted employee.

07/17/2022

Simple QuickBooks Online Procedure saves a Personal Injury Lawyer $20,000




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I was recently engaged to help a personal injury law firm clean up their books. The first thing we did was setup QuickBooks Online and transfer their desktop file.

07/15/2022

When you’re waiting for your settlement check, the last thing on earth that anyone wants to experience is a delay. But there are steps in place if this should happen and personal injury attorneys can help make sure nothing slows down getting paid – especially when they know how important timely disbursement of funds (especially after an auto accident) means!

Read on: https://injurylawyeraccounting.com/what-happens-after-you-reach-a-personal-injury-settlement/

Personal injury cases can be exhausting for you and your lawyer. You may have been through a difficult trial or tough negotiations with insurance companies, but now it's time for you to get some relief!

07/14/2022

Accountants have an important role in law firms. They can help you ensure that your business is running as efficiently as possible to focus on what’s important: your clients.




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Accountants have an important role in law firms. They can help you ensure that your business is running as efficiently as possible to focus on what's important: your clients.

07/12/2022

Self-employed individuals who are injured often struggle financially due to the loss of their ability and time to operate their business or work. They can recover these economic damages through personal injury courts. The court compensates them for everything they have lost including wages earned but not yet paid and any profits that would’ve come from what work was done had it not been interrupted by your injuries.

Learn more: https://injurylawyeraccounting.com/how-can-injury-accounting-services-help-personal-injury-cases/

The most common types of personal injuries involve hiring multiple experts depending on the injury severity. Using this service could make things go more smoothly when dealing directly with insurance companies who may want different opinions from people outside their company because they don't under...

07/05/2022

One of the most important things for any lawyer to have is expert knowledge and insight. Without it, you will not be able to win your case! Accountants can provide this type of service as they specialize in analyzing financial data from both sides: prosecution or defense- which means that their opinion carries significant weight when making decisions about how much guilt someone deserves due to punishment.

Learn more: https://injurylawyeraccounting.com/how-does-the-accounting-work-at-the-end-of-the-case/

Legal accountants are often asked to assist attorneys and insurance companies in the quantification of economic losses resulting from personal injury, wrongful death, or lost employment. T

06/30/2022

The difference between accounting and bookkeeping is that accounting involves the preparation of financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement) using recorded data from bookkeeping.

Read on: https://injurylawyeraccounting.com/is-quickbooks-bookkeeping-or-accounting/

If you're trying to decide whether QuickBooks is a bookkeeping or accounting software, the truth is that QuickBooks does both.

06/27/2022

Personal Injury Lawyer Loses $80,000 in Embezzlement

Read on: https://injurylawyeraccounting.com/personal-injury-lawyer-loses-80000-in-embezzlement/

06/27/2022

The next step we took in QuickBooks Online we set up the same report to show the client costs transaction for the prior week. We then set up an email schedule in QuickBooks Online so the managing lawyer and the bookkeeper received the client cost by client report each Monday morning. This simple report will insure that the problem would not occur again.

This is one of the basic procedures in our system.

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Read on: https://injurylawyeraccounting.com/simple-quickbooks-online-procedure-saves-a-personal-injury-lawyer-20000/

06/27/2022

Understanding the accounting for insurance loss reserves is essential for insurance professionals to understand the company’s financial statements and financial health. In this blog post, you have a basic overview of how insurance companies estimate their loss reserves based on past and future losses, how they are presented on the balance sheet, and why they are essential.

Read on: https://injurylawyeraccounting.com/accounting-for-insurance-loss-reserves/