Granite State Trust Counsel is a Manchester-based firm handling estate administration and personal injury matters across all six New England states. For nearly forty years, the firm's trust accounting lived in paper ledgers maintained by a senior bookkeeper who knew every quirk of the system. When that bookkeeper announced her retirement, the partners faced a hard truth: the firm had decades of undocumented practices and a state bar — six of them, actually — that take IOLTA enforcement very seriously. Granite State moved its full trust operation to Disbo to digitize the historical record before succession became a crisis.
The Problem
- Decades of trust history living in paper files and a single bookkeeper's institutional memory
- Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont each maintain strict IOLTA enforcement programs with regular random audits
- Three-way reconciliation done by hand from printed bank statements every month
- No immutable audit trail — handwritten ledger entries could be amended without leaving a record
- Succession risk: when the long-tenured bookkeeper retired, the firm had no documented process
The Solution
- Guided migration imported Granite State's historical client ledgers and opened a clean digital trust record from day one
- State-specific rule packs for all six New England jurisdictions enforce reconciliation cadence and overdraft notification automatically
- Immutable, timestamped audit trail on every trust transaction — replacing paper ledgers with bar-defensible records
- Documented, repeatable workflows that survived the bookkeeper's retirement and passed cleanly to her replacement
Granite State Trust Counsel brought four decades of New England trust history into modern, bar-defensible accounting — and removed the single-person dependency that threatened the firm's compliance posture.