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How to pay your legal fees to Rollins and Chan

Transcript
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mark Rollins. I'm a
partner here with the Law Firm of Rollins and Chan. Today we're just
discussing a very brief educational video on how to pay the firm. It sounds
like it would be pretty simple, but in D.C. and in most honest states,
Maryland and D.C. both require attorneys that are conducting business to
have two separate accounts. One is a trust account and the other is an
operational account.

The trust account, when you put money to the trust account, it goes to that
Bar Association. The Bar Association takes the interest from the money.
Usually it's very low, and so they'll take the interest from that. But the
major point is that the money that goes into the trust account does not
belong to the attorney. It belongs to the client, and has not been decided
on where that money goes yet.

So, usually this is the first payment in the case because the attorney has
not started or has not begun any work on the case. Usually, clients will
add funds into this trust account when they're on an hourly basis, because
the attorney hasn't given them an exact amount of money of how much it will
take to conclude the case.

But for most of our cases here, we have ours going to the operational
account. One is that the client can [inaudible 00:01:26] most of the
payments going into the operational account. Usually this is money owed to
the firm or for an outstanding bill. So, this is just a breakdown, because
on our website, rollinsandchan.com/portal, you'll see that you can actually
make a payment to one of these two accounts. So I'm just trying to explain
to you which one of these accounts you would pay into.

For most of this, remember this is only pay this way if you owe. So, when
you click on Pay Bill, you usually have an outstanding bill. We've sent you
a bill, and now you just click on this to pay the bill. Or you can just
click on the bottom of the invoice and it will go through this payment
through PayPal, and so your payment goes through PayPal. It goes directly
into our operational account.

If, however, you are a new client and we have not begun any work on your
case, and you are just simply hiring us and this is your first time hiring
us - if we haven't gone to court yet, we haven't done anything - then the
payment is going to go through this account, which is a trust account
payment right here. So you click on Pay Retainer, and the money would go
through this account and it would have this title on it. So when you see
this, you know the money is going to the trust account.

Again, the trust account belongs to the client. It does not belong to the
attorney, and the money in that account belongs to the client. It's only
when work is performed on the case can the attorney then take money from
the trust account and put into his operational account. So that's just a
brief overview to explain to you the difference of why there are two
payments on our account where you can pay the bill or you pay retainer.

So hopefully that helps explain the differences on the accounts. Again, if
you have any other questions, just contact us and we'll be happy to speak
to you about this. Thank you.