lawyer trust and operating accounts

Transcript Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mark Rollins. I’m a partner here with the Law Firm of Rollins and Chan. Today we’re just discussing a very brief educational video on how to pay the firm. It sounds like it would be pretty simple, but in D.C. and in most honest states, Maryland and D.C. both require attorneys that are conducting business to have two separate accounts. One is a trust account and the other is an operational account. The trust account, when you put money to the trust account, it goes to that Bar Association. The Bar Association takes the interest from the money. Usually it’s very low, and so they’ll take the interest from that. But the major point is that the money that goes into the trust account does not belong to the attorney. It belongs to the client, and has not been decided on where that money goes yet. So, usually this is the first payment in the case because the attorney has not started or has not begun any work on the case. Usually, clients will add funds into this trust account when they’re on an hourly basis, because the attorney hasn’t given them an exact amount of money of how much it will take to conclude the case. But for most of our cases here, we have ours going to the operational account. One is that the client can [inaudible 00:01:26] most of the payments going into the operational account. Usually this is money owed to the firm or for an outstanding bill. So, this is just a breakdown, because on our website, rollinsandchan.com/portal, you’ll see that you can actually make a payment to one of these two accounts. So I’m just trying to explain to you which one of these accounts you would pay into. For most of this, remember this is only pay this way if you owe. So, when you click on Pay Bill, you usually have an outstanding bill. We’ve sent you a bill, and now you just click on this to pay the bill. Or you can just click on the bottom of the invoice and it will go through this payment through PayPal, and so your payment goes through PayPal. It goes directly into our operational account. If, however, you are a new client and we have not begun any work on your case, and you are just simply hiring us and this is your first time hiring us – if we haven’t gone to court yet, we haven’t done anything – then the payment is going to go through this account, which is a trust account payment right here. So you click on Pay Retainer, and the money would go through this account and it would have this title on it. So when you see this, you know the money is going to the trust account. Again, the trust account belongs to the client. It does not belong to the attorney, and the money in that account belongs to the client. It’s only when work is performed on the case can the attorney then take money from the trust account and put into his operational account. So that’s just a brief overview to explain to you the difference of why there are two payments on our account where you can pay the bill or you pay retainer. So hopefully that helps explain the differences on the accounts. Again, if you have any other questions, just contact us and we’ll be happy to speak to you about this. Thank you.