PerfectAudit.com

Do you wrestle with stacks of bank statements for your cases? Are you manually entering transactions from the statements into Excel spreadsheet? Are you begging for a better way? We may have one for you.

Jim Schaefer is a great forensic accountant based in Southern California. His firm, Schaefer & Company, specializes in family law forensics.  Like me, he is also a repaid tech geek. Today I am lucky enough to have Jim guest posting on a new discovery of his for discovery in your cases. Here's Jim to tell you about PerfectAudit.com:

As you know, a direct mechanical tracing is comprised of two parts:  check register and

characterization columns.  Perfect Audit automates the check register portion.  The software incorporates the bank statement formats for bank accounts and credit card statements to provide a pretty good quality OCR result from pdf format.  (Brokerage statements are beyond its scope.)

Picture feeding pdf bank statements into a hopper.  In a day or two you receive a searchable transactions listing that may be downloaded in Microsoft Excel format.  Thus Perfect Audit gives you the check register portion for about 40 cents per pdf page.  (you pay for what you use with no minimum monthly charge).

Before using the Perfect Audit transaction data, you will want to create a running balance column in your check register and check against bank statement balances.  I find that there are a few transactions that are double-entered that are easily corrected.

Perfect Audit really shines when you are searching for the other side of an internal money transfer for wire transfer as there is a search capability on the dollar amount.

One tip is important.  If you provide duplicate bank statements to Perfect Audit, Perfect Audit will give you duplicate entrees in its transaction listings.  Thus it is best to avoid sending duplicate statements to Perfect Audit.

I have seen unfavorable ratings of the software on the web.  My experience differs and has been quite good.  (…and my clients love it when I tell them we are using the latest robotic technology to reduce the cost of their tracing.)  

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information about Harding & Associates Family Law 

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Tech Is Gonna Help You to Know Your Judge

To this day -- 30 years later -- I remember a story my law school civil procedure professor told us about his first attorney job. 20 years earlier he had been hired by a prominent Wall Street firm. He was assigned to a team for work on an appeal to a U.S. Court of Appeal. For three weeks his only task was to research the lives and histories of the justices assigned to the case. Not just their written opinions, but where they went to school, who they were married to, what their children were about, what kind of food they ate. What size shoe they wore... That level of intel gathering impressed me.  The need to know your judge stuck with me.

I am a firm believer that it is only good lawyering to learn as much as you can about the judge you are litigating in front of. Venture capital and the artificial intelligence world agree with me, and their help is on the way.

Gavelytics is a start-up that focuses on gathering info about, and predicting rulings of, the judges
you are going in front of -- even in simple old family law.

Right now Gavelytics is limited to LA County and Riverside County, but that will change. It is also light on, but not without, family law judges. The user interface is pretty cool. The landing page for each judge includes where they are, who they work with, how you contact them, where they went to school, how they got to the bench. Take a look:

Click the image for a larger look

There's more. Here are some of the Gavelytics tools:

• Judicial Workload
• Learn how long it takes to get to trial, the average delay between complaint filing and the initial CMC, and average case length, all compared to the jurisdictional average.
• Gavelscore
• Discover whether a judge has ruled more often for plaintiffs or defendants in bench trials. No more guesswork about a judge's most important decisions.
• Motion Analyzer
• See how a judge has ruled on 100+ different types of California motions, including summary judgment, demurrers, and motions to compel.
• Motion Details
• Compare a judge's motion ruling tendencies to the jurisdictional average, providing crucial context so you can determine if your judge is an outlier–and what to do about it.
• Learn how often parties make CCP § 170.6 filings against your judge
• Take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds and see how often other parties paper your judge, all searchable by filing party and case type.
• See crucial judge ruling and docket speed data in a single dashboard
• The Judge Summary
• Takes the most important judicial data points, like tendencies on summary judgment motions, discovery motions and docket speed, and puts them in a simple dashboard for easy reference.

What's it cost? $35 to $65 per month. Not bad. This is a technology that I am going to have to keep my eye on....

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information about Harding & Associates Family Law 

#Harding&AssociatesFamilyLaw #californiafamilylaw #divorce #family law #superlawyers #americanacademyofmatrimoniallawyers #Pleasantondivorce #AlamedaCountyDivorce #ContraCostaCountyDivorce #lawyers

What A Receptionist Should, And Should Not, Say...

Here's an interesting one for you my fellow members of the bar...

I am in the process of negotiating the settlement of a case. As with most cases, it has been a back and forth process. Last week opposing counsel sent me an email with settlement terms. On Monday I called the attorney's office and left a message asking him to call me.  No return call. Yesterday morning I sent an email to the attorney asking him to call me so that we could wrap up the settlement. No return call. Today I called his office again.

The receptionist answered. “Hello. John Harding to speak with _ _ _ please on the _ _ _ matter.”  “Are you calling in response to the last email he sent you?” “I am calling to talk about the entire case.” Then she says, “There is no need for you to talk to him unless you are calling to accept all of the terms of his email.”

Say what? Am I wrong, or is it out of line to be told by an opposing attorney's support staff when I can discuss a case with opposing counsel? Am I wrong to expect opposing counsel to return my call? Only after the receptionist emailed her boss, was I able to schedule a phone call with him for the next day. 

Unbelievable. Then again, maybe I missed something during all those lectures on courtesy and professionalism.... 

I would love some feedback from the audience on this.

Please visit hardinglaw.com for more information about Harding & Associates Family Law 

#Harding&AssociatesFamilyLaw #californiafamilylaw #divorce #family law #superlawyers #americanacademyofmatrimoniallawyers #Pleasantondivorce #AlamedaCountyDivorce #ContraCostaCountyDivorce #lawyers