Kantivo's Law Firms edition gives solo attorneys and small practices a per-client IOLTA ledger that physically refuses overdrafts and commingling — plus matters, recorded conflict searches, automatic withdrawal notices, and the three-way rec your bar examiner wants to see. All inside your regular accounting, at one annual price.
Try It Free for 30 DaysGeneric bookkeeping tools treat the IOLTA account like any other bank account. Nothing stops a payment from Client A's funds landing on Client B's bill, nothing flags a client balance going negative, and yesterday's trust entry can be quietly rewritten today. Each of those is a bar complaint — and the usual fix is a second subscription to a legal practice suite at $40–$200 per seat per month.
Trust account violations sit at the top of attorney discipline statistics year after year. The rules themselves are simple; what fails is enforcement-by-spreadsheet on a busy Friday. Software that merely records trust activity doesn't protect you. Software has to refuse the bad transaction.
Retainer goes into the flagged IOLTA account; that client's ledger begins.
Time accrues on the matter; one click turns WIP into a draft invoice.
Earned fees move to operating, the invoice gets paid, the client gets notified — atomically.
Try to draw $5,001 from a client holding $5,000 and the transfer is rejected — even if the IOLTA account holds $80,000 of other clients' money. Try to point a trust drawdown at another client's invoice and the option simply doesn't exist. Try to edit a posted trust entry and you'll find there's no edit button — only a void, which requires a reason and leaves the original on display. The rules live in the ledger, not in a training manual.
Flag your IOLTA bank account and Kantivo builds the matching "Funds Held in Trust" liability automatically. Every dollar in the account is attributed to a specific client — deposits, transfers, disbursements, refunds — with running balances and a permanent record of who posted what.
Enter the bank statement figures; Kantivo derives the book balance and the client-ledger total itself and declares the verdict live. No self-certifying, no spreadsheet — and no saving an out-of-balance rec without writing down why.
The new-matter flow starts with a search across your clients, their related parties, all matter names, and every opposing party and counsel you've ever logged. The search, its hits, and your clearance call are stored permanently — that record is your documented COI procedure.
Each case carries its number (auto-issued per year, or your own format), billing method, attorneys, opposing party, full status history, and a statute-of-limitations date feeding deadline alerts.
Effective-dated rate tables per timekeeper mean January's rate increase never rewrites December's entries. Time logged on a matter prices itself, and the Bill WIP button converts everything unbilled into a reviewable draft invoice — one line per time entry, defensible to the client line by line.
Bars including New York, California, and Texas require the client be told whenever trust funds move to your operating account. Kantivo makes the notice a by-product of the transfer itself — the PDF is generated in the same action, so skipping it isn't possible.
If your firm needs case management, the dedicated legal suites earn their keep. But many small practices buy them for exactly one reason: trust accounting their bookkeeping software can't do. Kantivo removes that reason. The trust ledger, the conflict log, and the rec live in the same double-entry books as your rent, payroll, and operating revenue — one login, one data store, one price.
Underneath the legal layer is the full Kantivo platform: bank feeds with reconciliation, AI-assisted categorization, invoicing with card payments, 1099 handling for experts and court reporters, custom reporting, audit logs, and multi-company support. The Law Firms edition is a vertical workflow on top of real accounting software — not a bolted-on module.
No. It's a license feature inside the standard Kantivo app, included from the Pro tier up. When your license covers it, ⚖️ Law Firm appears in the sidebar by itself — same installer, same database.
Structurally. A trust-to-operating transfer is anchored to an invoice, and the invoice picker only offers invoices belonging to the client whose funds are being drawn. There's no field where you could enter a different client — the bad transaction can't be expressed, let alone posted.
Each outflow — drawdown, disbursement, or refund — is checked against that specific client's ledger balance under a lock, so even two simultaneous transfers can't sneak past. If the amount exceeds the client's balance, the server rejects it with an explanation. The total bank balance is irrelevant; only the client's own money counts.
A single atomic operation: the Funds Held in Trust liability is debited, the IOLTA bank credited, your operating bank debited, Accounts Receivable credited, the payment applied to the invoice, and the client's ledger entry written. If any part can't complete, none of it posts.
Yes — both levels are supported. Deposits without a matter pool at the client level; deposits tagged to a matter are segregated per case, and outflows respect the per-matter balance. Use whichever your engagement letters call for, including a mix.
Flag two trust accounts, one per state bar, each with its own state code. Ledgers and reconciliations remain entirely separate, and you flip between them with the account selector.
Built in. The settlement worksheet runs the waterfall — gross recovery, costs off the top, fee percentage on the rest, client net — with live recalculation and every number adjustable to the negotiated outcome. Distributing posts a single guarded journal (fee to income, costs recovered, firm share to operating, client paid from trust), refuses to run before the settlement is deposited or to run twice, and produces a settlement statement PDF with signature lines.
Yes — tag any vendor bill to a matter as a hard cost (passes at cost) or a soft cost (firm-default markup, set once in Firm Settings). The Bill WIP flow puts unbilled costs on the draft invoice next to the unbilled time, and costs a settlement already reimbursed are blocked from billing automatically.
The opposite. Under the legal features it's ordinary double-entry bookkeeping: a bank asset offset by a liability, with standard journal entries. Your CPA sees a normal General Ledger and Balance Sheet — just ones where the trust mechanics were enforced all year.
Zero. It's bundled with Pro and higher. Compare that with adding a legal practice suite on top of your accounting subscription, and the math is the pitch.
30-day free trial. Full Law Firms edition included.