Law firms and the attorneys that own them are a critical part of the professional service sector that dominates the South Florida economy. As a deal-centric region, with entertainment, real estate, and international business as paramount, lawyers and their law firms are critical to getting business done.
Lawyers and law firms manage the legal affairs for their clients. As a CPA Firm, most of our interactions with lawyers revolve around areas of tax law, business formation/acquisitions, and estate and trust issues. Where business or finance intersect with the law, you will find an overlap between tax and accounting issues and legal issues.
Our CPA Firm works with attorneys in two major ways. As fellow professionals, we work together to help make sure financial transactions take place as needed. While attorneys focus on the legal portions of the transaction, we focus on the financial and tax implications of the transaction. Ultimately, even tax lawyers with tremendous expertise often fail to understand how to implement their agreements without a CPA to translate the contract points into actual entry points on IRS forms.
The other way we work with law firms is as our clients. One of our areas of expertise is dealing with smaller firms, with 1-4 attorney-owners, and a mixture of lawyers and paralegals making up the rest of the billing. We also work with a substantial number of sole practitioner attorneys, who need to maintain all the accounting and financial trappings of a larger law firm, especially in regards to trust account matters, without the resources of a larger firm.