Add-on for any plan
Build the settlement statement, work your disbursement checklist, and pay every provider from your IOLTA account in one place — with every figure computed from the trust ledger itself, so the statement and the account cannot drift apart.
Most of a matter's life is one deposit and a few disbursements. A settlement is different: one recovery split across the firm, the client, and a dozen providers and lienholders, usually reconciled by hand in a spreadsheet that has no idea what the trust ledger says.
That gap is where the errors live. A lien negotiated down after the statement was printed. A cheque voided and re-issued without the statement following. A provider paid twice because an expense the firm already advanced was cut a second cheque from trust. None of these are careless — they are the predictable result of the document and the account being two separate things.
The Settlement Generator makes them one thing.
How it works
Open a settlement on the matter and the gross is filled in from the deposit already sitting in your trust account — you do not re-key a figure the ledger already knows. If a second carrier pays later, it offers you the new total rather than changing it behind your back.
Attorney-paid expenses, the fee, medical providers and liens. Every balance, the fee and the net to the client are computed — the fee is stored as its terms, never as a number that can go stale when a cost is corrected. The net to the client is what remains, so the statement foots to the penny by construction.
Your firm's own SOP, item by item: release and UM/UIM consent, the child support judgment search, lien identification and written verification, LOP review. Each tick records who attested to it and when, in a tamper-evident audit log.
Print a clean statement for the client, or a watermarked draft for internal review. When you record the sign-off, the figures are fingerprinted — so if anything changes afterwards, the approval is flagged as covering a different document instead of quietly standing.
One click writes every payment into the trust ledger, queued for check printing. Attorney-paid expenses become a single reimbursement check to the firm rather than a check to each vendor you already paid. Unresolved liens are held back in trust, not paid out.
What it protects you from
Every one of these is a real way a settlement goes wrong, and every one is checked before money moves rather than discovered at reconciliation.
Amounts get corrected after a statement is printed. Because every figure is computed from the ledger rather than stored, a corrected cost moves the fee basis, the balances and the net together — and if a cheque is later voided or edited in the register, the affected line is flagged rather than silently left wrong.
Twelve payments that are each smaller than the balance can still overdraw it together. Every disbursement is checked per matter, in aggregate, inside the transaction — so one client's funds cannot pay another client's providers.
Disbursing before the settlement cheque clears is the classic trust-account problem. If the deposit has not been marked cleared, you are told before anything leaves the account, and choosing to continue is recorded against your name.
A statement can add up perfectly and still be incomplete. Any payment on the matter that no statement line accounts for is surfaced, so the document and the account are reconciled to each other rather than merely internally consistent.
Liens are deducted from the client's net but deliberately not disbursed. The money stays in the client's ledger until the lienholder is actually settled with, and the remaining balance shows exactly what is being held and why.
Compliance items cannot be ticked until the thing they attest to is true, and they are withdrawn automatically — with an audit entry — if the figures they rested on change. Nothing in the file claims something that has stopped being the case.
Every settlement payment is an ordinary withdrawal on the client's matter — the same kind of entry you would have written by hand. It appears in your bank register, on the client ledger card, and in all three parts of your monthly reconciliation, exactly once. Adding the Settlement Generator changes nothing about how your trust account reconciles.
The Settlement Generator is an add-on to any IOLTA Guard plan. It appears as a line on your existing invoice, prorated from the day you add it, and you can remove it at any time.