Maintaining Your Client Trust Accounts with Tabs3

Every lawyer in Minnesota who holds any money of clients or third persons in connection with a representation must deposit the money in one or more identifiable trust accounts, and must maintain certain records about those trust accounts, and be able to produce them at any time. Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 1.15 ("MRPC") details the obligations. Rule 1.15 is supplemented every year by an "Appendix 1," written by the Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board ("LPRB"). Those two documents tell you what records you must keep, but mostly do not tell you how. Nor, our new lawyer members every year tell us, do the law schools provide any training on how to keep trust accounts. This guide is meant to show how you can meet your obligations using the "Trust Accounting Software" ("TAS") module in Tabs3. Other ways exist, and other software programs. The Minnesota State Bar Association ("MSBA") has authored guides for several. One reason for adding a guide for Tabs3 lies in the fact that Tabs3 as a whole offers more than just trust accounting. It includes practice and case management, too. More and more lawyers are using such integrated programs. But the Tabs3 help materials for its trust accounting modules tend to be focused at a very low level, and do not give a good overview beginning at the "big picture" level, but with step-by-step instructions. This guide intends to fill that gap.