LAWFUSION is very strong on legal aid functionality right across the board. All legal aid claims, which have fees and disbursements agreed, are instantly billed through the system and all bills are paid from a pre-configured legal aid account on the system of your choosing. Within the legal aid billing process in LAWFUSION the system can allocate fees to the P&L based on Fee Earners or type of work. Legal aid profitability reports are available enabling firms to accurately monitor their legal aid business.

Cash is king when for any growing law firm and LAWFUSION is designed to help you keep control of the time lag between ‘paying out’ to your third parties and ‘collecting fees’ from your clients. A configurable cash flow report comes as standard with LAWFUSION and the system offers a number of debt collection tools to ensure you collect your money as quickly as possible. E.g. flexible aged debtor reports, debt reminders module, client statements, telephone-based debt collections procedures you can follow, with debt diary and follow up actions.

LAWFUSION Accounts contains a dedicated client ledger for holding client accounting information. This is divided into client, deposit, disbursement, office and in-house expense ledgers for each matter/case. If required, the disbursement ledger can be combined with the office ledger.

All of the standard posting types are available and include payments, receipts, invoices, credit notes, journals, write-offs and in-house expenses.

LAWFUSION provides a full commercial, multi-level nominal ledger. Two sets of budgets are available for each nominal account (such as projected, worst / best case) for comparison of nominal balances against budgets or previous years’ actual figures. Budgets can be set up quickly and easily by specifying a percentage split, or user-defined calculations, i.e. seasonal. All of the standard posting types are available and include payments, receipts, journals, write-offs, batch journals, recurring journals and reversing journals. Year end journals provide a quick and easy method of clearing down the revenue and expense accounts. Standard reports such as Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss and Trial Balance are available.

The LAWFUSION purchase ledger integrates to both the nominal and disbursement ledgers and also provides for the posting of counsel fees. All of the standard posting types are available – i.e. bills, credit notes, payments, receipts, journals and write-offs. Bills and credit notes can be split to multiple nominal and/or disbursement ledgers. Standard reports such as ‘Aged Creditors’ and ‘Cash Required’ are available so you can quickly and easily see what you owe and to who.

LAWFUSION Accounts contains a full VAT ledger system for completing the VAT 100 form and provides a full VAT audit trail. The VAT Ledger can be configured for either cash or bills delivered VAT accounting.

LAWFUSION provides automatic bank reconciliation so you can compare your accounting records with your bank statement.

LAWFUSION supports the numerous bank accounts a law firm might need – i.e. client, office, petty cash etc. with user friendly bank reconciliation facilities. Bank reconciliation reports and cash book reports are provided as standard and these can be produced historically if required. Of course the production of a monthly bank reconciliation statement in line with the Solicitors Accounts Rules is quick and easy in LAWFUSION.  Standing orders and direct debits can be set-up to post automatically when due.  Law firms can upload their list of daily BACS transactions to the bank for payment or they can design their own cheque layout and can print cheques if required , singly or in batches.

Fee earners can issue requests to the accounts team for payments or incoming funds by saving an e-chitty into the case document tray in LAWFUSION.

LAWFUSION users do not need to keep separate deposit accounts because all monies can be held in one high interest bearing account and any deposit interest due to clients is calculated by the system as per Law Society Rules.  Calculations can be produced on a single matter, all matters for a specific client, or across the entire client ledger. The system caters for multiple interest rate tables and any number of rate changes. Use of a clearance period table for different transaction types ensures calculations are applied to cleared balances only. The interest can be automatically posted to the account ledger if required. It will also post the appropriate inter-bank transfer for you. Reports showing  all interest calculations are available for audit and verification purposes and a tax file can be produced for reporting high interest client accounts to the Inland Revenue.

The interest calculator can alos be pointed at the debtors’ ledger to automate interest charges on outstanding bills. It will automatically post the appropriate interest to the bill and to your nominal ledger. The interest calculator also allows the entry of manual transactions for ad-hoc calculations.

LAWFUSION allows you to write your own anti-money laundering procedures as a workflow chart, making sure you follow best practice and satisfy the necessary due diligence. However, as standard, within the software law firms get a whole raft of AML functionality.  For example the software:

• warns you if you accept funds and the anti-money laundering checks have not been completed for the client.
• warns you if you accept funds over a certain value.
• reminds you if your anti-money laundering checks are out of date.
• reminds you if the anti-money laundering checks are incomplete.
• allows you to enter the checks done and also to scan in documents, papers, etc.
• optionally, integrates to external identity checking and KYC services such as Call ML and the 192.com service.
• produces a “suspicion letter” to the Anti-Money Laundering Officer (AMO) in your firm.
• optionally, passes on your suspicions to The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

To maximise cash flow and improve the management of outgoing payments, LAWFUSION provides a comprehensive requisitions and remittance facility via the purchase ledger and also for client money. The system has a BACs export facility which allows an upload to the bank to save manual entry or sending cheques. Payment requisitions can be raised and sent electronically to cashiers, who can, providing they have the right levels of security permissions on the system, post them instantly to the ledger to generate either a BACS payment, or a printed cheque if required. This can significantly speed up the payment process and reduce errors. Remittance advices can also be produced via the purchase ledger and distributed electronically, or printed.

• Office and client account payments can be requested from multiple locations, against multiple matters.
• BACS references / cheque numbers are automatically updated on the ledger enquiry so that users can see when they were drawn.
• When payments are reconciled or cleared, the date is also cleared and shows on the ledger.
• Additional information such as file/case/matter numbers and fee earner details can be included with the BACS or cheque payment.
• Cheques, which are totally configurable with different layouts for different banks, can be produced in batches or singly, and printed via dot matrix or laser printers.

When a fee earner claims an expense, such as mileage or car parking it can be immediately available for billing as a disbursement if appropriate, or for submitting to the LAA (for a legal aid claim) and also for analysis and reporting. As the expense is entered it becomes part of an expense claim that is submitted for approval (where necessary) without any duplication of effort. Acceptance / rejection of the expense claim is instantly visible to the fee earner on screen (and a paper form can be produced if required). The Fee Earner ticks a box to indicate he/she has a receipt for the item (and for those striving for a paperless office receipts can be scanned in and attached to the expense claim.)  The system handles different rates for mileage e.g. if a Fee Earner is paid mileage at 25p per mile, but the firm has agreed mileage will be charged out at 40p per mile to the client – the system picks up the relevant rates and bills the client at the correct rate, and pays the fee earner accordingly. The software also handles the public and private mileage rates required for LAA work. A single payment is made to the fee earner for aggregated expenses claims. LAWFUSION also manages the recharging internal expenses such as photocopying and faxing, etc.

One of the UK’s largest providers of Legal Aid

“With the introduction of LAWFUSION and its billing wizards our fee earners are now able to bill their own work and it’s been great because they take more commercial responsibility for their work.”

Rupert Hawke, Managing Director, Cartwright King

Specialists in Family Law

With LAWFUSION our legal aid billing is taking 60% less time.”

Glyn Abba, Finance Manager, Family Law Group