I work for a mass tort law firm. We received settlement money on behalf of multiple clients, so I created sub trust accounts for each client under the case trust. I have created invoices for all the clients so we could allocate our earned fees and advanced costs, and was going to transfer the trust amount to operating, pay the client invoice, close out their ledger.
Another person in my firm wired the earned fees and costs for 41 clients directly from the trust account to a lending company we use. Half was wired back to us (our portion) to operating for our fees. The other half is done and gone.
I now have 41 clients with trust ledger balances where the trust money really isn’t there. And 41 clients with open invoices. I can apply the “returned” half of the wire to some of the invoices. Still doesn’t help me clear out the trust ledgers, or satisfy the other open invoices. I don’t know how to fix this. Half the money is just gone without being used to close out the clients file, and I don’t see a way to do this without allocating more earned fees than are really there.
Any help would be great!!!
