This book covers topics such as: fundamentals of law firm financial information, with easy-to-understand examples of the data involved and financial management concepts.

Few professions are free of the need to understand accounting, least of all the legal profession. Legal accounting is a category all on its own, because attorneys are expected to keep trust accounts for most of their clients, deal with conveyancing and understand the issues around shared accounts -- whether at a corporate or domestic level. This book deals with the fundamentals of accounting, such as debits and credits and how income statements and balance sheets are created. The book also takes you through the transfer journal, bank reconciliations, VAT, correspondent accounts, accounting in conveyancing matters, legislation applying to attorneys' accounting and partners' capital accounts. Easy-to-understand examples clearly explain the principles involved.

In under 100 pages, Law Firm Accounting Demystified gives every legal practice a basic primer on the unique aspects of legal accounting that every lawyer and legal accounting professional should know. It covers all the bases -- from trusts to revenue recognition to bank reconciliations and more. Any attorney who gets overwhelmed by accounting minutiae can use Law Firm Accounting Demystified not only as a handy desk reference -- but also as a practical guide to taking a more systematic approach to keeping current, compliant books on an ongoing basis.

A powerful new tool for all forensic accountants, or anyone whoanalyzes data that may have been altered Benford's Law gives the expected patterns of the digits in thenumbers in tabulated data such as town and city populations orMadoff's fictitious portfolio returns. Those digits, in unaltereddata, will not occur in equal proportions; there is a large biastowards the lower digits, so much so that nearly one-half of allnumbers are expected to start with the digits 1 or 2. Thesepatterns were originally discovered by physicist Frank Benford inthe early 1930s, and have since been found to apply to alltabulated data. Mark J. Nigrini has been a pioneer in applyingBenford's Law to auditing and forensic accounting, even before hisgroundbreaking 1999 Journal of Accountancy article introducing thisuseful tool to the accounting world. In Benford's Law, Nigrinishows the widespread applicability of Benford's Law and itspractical uses to detect fraud, errors, and other anomalies. Explores primary, associated, and advanced tests, all describedwith data sets that include corporate payments data and electiondata Includes ten fraud detection studies, including vendor fraud,payroll fraud, due diligence when purchasing a business, and taxevasion Covers financial statement fraud, with data from Enron, AIG,and companies that were the target of hedge fund short sales Looks at how to detect Ponzi schemes, including data on Madoff,Waxenberg, and more Examines many other applications, from the Clinton tax returnsand the charitable gifts of Lehman Brothers to tax evasion andnumber invention Benford's Law has 250 figures and uses 50 interestingauthentic and fraudulent real-world data sets to explain boththeory and practice, and concludes with an agenda and directionsfor future research. The companion website adds additionalinformation and resources.

This book is both revolutionary and traditional, using primary materials rather than author narrative. By adopting this traditional approach for law and accounting, Cunningham's new book puts the subject on par with other law school courses. This traditional "cases and materials" approach underscores how accounting standards bear earmarks of functional law. To facilitate analogical and critical engagement on par with other law school teaching books, pedagogical design follows the classic casebook method of arranging cases and materials in pairs of opposites and complements. This arrangement enables conceptualizing accounting as functional law as theoretical and analytical matters as well. This original content also illuminates transaction economics, factors associated with accounting irregularities and the lawyer's role in financial reporting.