Solicitors’ practices need to be run in a particular way because of the responsibility they have towards their clients. Not only do they provide advice on many aspects of people’s lives and businesses, but they will often hold considerable sums of money on their client’s behalf. This means they are in a position of trust, and breach of this trust can have major repercussions. It is therefore vital that they have a legal cashier to manage their accounts for them.

A legal cashier is a bookkeeper who has knowledge of the Solicitors Accounts Rules and understands how money held on behalf of a client needs to be handled. Usually, a bookkeeper will only have to deal with a company’s own accounts and trading stock. A legal cashier will deal with the Solicitor’s own business accounts in the same way but he is also responsible for the Solicitor’s client account where any money provided by his clients will be kept.

The legal cashier must ensure that the client money received is correctly allocated to each client ledger. This is extremely important as a solicitor does not have a separate account for each client’s money but a general client account into which all the client money is placed. The Solicitors Accounts Rules are there as a protection to the client to govern how this money is handled once in the account.

The legal cashier must follow these guidelines to make sure that no payments are made from client account which exceed the individual client’s funds provided. Otherwise, this will mean a breach of the Solicitors Accounts Rules as the firm will be using other clients’ money to fund the transaction. The accounts must therefore be kept up to date at all times and must be accurate.

There were originally very strict rules which clearly laid out the processes for the legal cashier to follow to avoid overdrawing client account or transferring money to the solicitor’s own account (office account) for payment of their fees or to recover any expenses paid out by the solicitor before sending the client a bill.

A good legal cashier will have an in-depth knowledge of the original rules as these provide a framework for interpretation of the new “guidelines” which have replaced them. These guidelines could lead an inexperienced cashier into difficulties as they are very vague.

At the Law Factory, we have a very experienced team of legal cashiers who have worked in all areas and types of law and have an in-depth knowledge of the SRA Accounts Rules. As a team, we support each other so that we can bring all our knowledge together to tackle new challenges and problems as they arise. We pride ourselves on being very approachable and are always keen to tailor our service to your firm’s personal needs.