This mass-tort and personal injury firm runs enterprise case management and accounting systems — and still reconciles its IOLTA in Excel. Disbursements go out in weekly runs every Monday and Tuesday via manually cut checks and file uploads to the bank. The headline number the firm's own accounting flagged: roughly $8 million in uncleared checks outstanding, alongside roughly $30 million a year in third-party referral fees going out the door. (Facts from this firm come from call summaries and are presented as facts, not quotes.)
What Their Old Flow Looked Like
- Roughly $8M in uncleared checks outstanding at any time — flagged internally as a major pain point
- IOLTA reconciliation maintained in Excel despite enterprise accounting systems
- Disbursements batched into manual Monday/Tuesday runs of cut checks and bank file uploads
- ~$30M a year in third-party referral fees managed through the same manual pipeline
- International clients — many with no US bank account — defaulting to mailed paper checks
How Disbo Replaces This Flow
- Clients, providers, and referral counsel are paid via Quick Pay and Standard Pay, shrinking the population of paper checks that can sit uncleared
- Checks that must exist are printed and mailed through Lob with tracking, so “uncleared” becomes a visible, per-matter status instead of an Excel mystery
- Referral-fee payments run through the same per-matter ledger as every other disbursement, with a full audit trail on ~$30M/yr of outflow
- IOLTA reconciliation runs continuously in the platform, retiring the Excel workbook
This firm's evaluation is ongoing and no realized before/after exists. Its accounting lead's sentiment, per the call summary: she would love to automate this. Disbo is built so that a firm moving eight figures a year does it on tracked rails with a per-matter ledger — not on a Monday/Tuesday check run and a spreadsheet.