Tag Archives: Easy Trust

Maryland Lawyers Member Benefit Provider News

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Easy
Soft is now an official Maryland State Bar Member Association (MSBA).
Easy Soft now offers a 10% discount on legal software for active members
of the Maryland Bar.

Since 1986, Easy Soft has been one of the nation’s leading providers of law office software.

Easy Soft Products

The
company’s offerings include seamless and integrated legal billing and
account software , such as Easy Time Bill (ETB), time billing software
which has received rave reviews from lawyers and technology publications, and Easy Trust, our easy-to-use trust fund accounting software.

For
real estate lawyers and settlement agents, Easy Soft provides the
country’s no. 1 choice for software that helps them navigate and
generate the tricky HUD settlement statement (or HUD-1 form )-especially
in light of the new RESPA rules. It’s called Easy HUD, and it automates
most HUD form calculations-simplifying the financial portion of the
transaction, enabling pain-free adjustments and errors, and more-while
leaving the legal work to you.

For divorce lawyers, Easy Soft
produces Divorce Financials, family law software which simplifies
financial modeling for divorces. The divorce software has a vast array
of capabilities, but one of its best is the ability to show you and your
client-precisely and powerfully-the real-world financial impact of a
given divorce settlements, including analyses for present value, and
income taxes for both parties.

The “Easy” in Easy Soft

The
philosophy behind all of Easy Soft’s law office management software is
simple: you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you work on a
case. At the outset, every piece of Easy Soft software captures case
data-one time only. For law office management purposes, that data is
inserted into your invoices, your ledgers and balance sheets, and your
trust fund accounting.

For
your clients’ cases, that data gets inserted into every piece of
documentation the case requires: be it a legal form, financial statement
(such as the HUD settlement statement, or HUD-1 form), and
correspondence with your client, or opposing lawyers. In some cases, the
software generates comparative analyses-and provides

In most
cases, our law office software performs any necessary calculations on
your behalf. If you’ve slaved over a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet,
or tried to get generic small business accounting software to deliver
needs specific to the management of a law office. This prevents simple
yet costly numerical mistakes-such as one that would be paid out over
the course of years (in divorce settlements), one that would affect your
title (in a HUD 1 situation), or one that would jeopardize your good
standing with your state’s attorney ethics department (in terms of your
trust fund accounting).

What’s Included

Typically, law firm software costs upwards of $400 for procurement, and hundreds of dollars more for training and support.

For
most of our software packages, our annual fees are just $300. All Easy
Soft software includes training, technical support, ongoing educational
support, frequent software updates and improvements, certain practice
customizations, and personalized (read: actual receptionists versus
phone menus) service.

With no limitations.

That is our level of commitment to our customers.

Practicing Law Is Just Like Practicing Anything Right

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Sure,
you’re smarter than the average Jamie…and your logic is, well,
flawless. But in many ways, the law is just like other professions. You
advise clients. You prepare forms and other documentation. Your brain is
your biggest tool-followed by that smart paralegal you hired, and
(let’s not forget!) your legal software . You bill hourly, and collect a
retainer against your billing.

Stop right there! The legal retainer is
different from other professions. It’s simple. The state says that
until you’ve earned the money, it doesn’t belong to you. To put it in
legal terms, possession does not equate to ownership-at least not when it comes to retainers.

Therefore, unearned retainers-particularly ones that won’t get used quickly-go into trust accounts , not operating accounts . Breaking this is considered a serious ethics violation-and you don’t want to face the consequences.*

So How Do You Keep Track Of The Money?

Even if you have the greatest legal billing software in the world (and of course we think that’s Easy Time Bill ): without a compatible trust component, you put yourself, your firm, and your career at tremendous-and unnecessary-risk.*

That’s why it’s not only helpful, it’s imperative for you to have escrow software or trust accounting software, too. It’s imperative for your law firm billing software to work hand in hand with that escrow (or trust accounting ) software.

To be clear: attorney billing software without trust account software
is like having a calculator that only adds, and doesn’t perform any
other functions. To multiply or subtract, you have to use another
calculator.

Trust accounting softwarewithout legal billing software
is like having a factory that only makes the bottles. You have to go
somewhere else for the caps-and they’re not designed to fit.

That would be ridiculous, right?

In comes Easy Soft . Our Easy Time Bill and Easy Trust
products are designed to work hand in hand. When the two pieces work in
tandem, the system tracks what you’ve taken against what you’ve earned.
You no longer need to tell the difference between the two: your
compatible law office software system does that for you.

Our next post will explain how it works.

*State ethics departments have a tendency to audit law firms at random.