Your firm is profitable on paper. Where is the money going?
Fractional CFO services for law firms. Financial clarity, cash flow confidence, and trust account protection — from someone who reads your numbers the way you read a case file.
Fractional CFO services for law firms. Financial clarity, cash flow confidence, and trust account protection — from someone who reads your numbers the way you read a case file.
Books that reconcile. Numbers you can defend. A clean picture of where the firm actually stands, not where the software says it does.
Trust account exposure, thin reserves, distributions outrunning collections. The problems that surface quietly before they surface loudly.
A specific decision with a number attached. What to pay, what to hold, what to change this month — not a report you file away.
Ongoing financial leadership for managing partners: monthly reporting you can actually read, forward-looking cash projections, and a standing conversation about the decisions in front of you. The seat between your bookkeeper and your tax preparer that most firms never fill.
A working allocation system for operating expenses, taxes, reserves, and partner draws — so distributions stop competing with payroll and the firm stops living quarter to quarter. Built around how legal revenue actually arrives: unevenly.
Three-way reconciliation, clean client ledgers, and documented procedures built around your jurisdiction's requirements. Your license is the asset on the line here, and most trust account problems are process problems long before they are ethics problems.
Where the work is billed but not collected, discounted but not tracked, and staffed at the wrong rate. Practice-area-level analysis that shows which matters carry the firm and which ones quietly cost you.
Partner buyouts, wind-downs, tax debt, lender negotiations, and books that have gone untouched for a year or more. Situations that need a steady hand and a full accounting before anyone can decide anything.
Thirty years in tax and accounting — including three as CFO of a San Diego construction trade association, and years spent inside businesses in transition, where the books had to be rebuilt before anyone could make a decision.
That work turned into a specialty. I've reconstructed neglected and incomplete records, traced transactions that were misclassified or difficult to follow, and sat with owners while they learned what their numbers were actually telling them. Law firms have their own version of this: trust accounts, contingency timing, and partner compensation that all have to be right at once.
Based in San Diego, working with law firms wherever they are.
Know what is true. Know what is at risk. Know what to do next.