Law And Accounting

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.

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.

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.

The growing internationalization of markets, the relaxation of constraints on capital flows between countries, and the creation of different economic unions -- the European Union in particular -- initiated the flow of capital, goods, and services across national borders, growth and diffusion of shareholding, and increased merger activity among the world’s largest stock exchanges. These changes have stimulated an interest in understanding developments in accounting and corporate governance in a newly qualitative way. Law, Corporate Governance, and Accounting sets out a framework for the analysis of institutional environments as the interconnected key tools of modern public corporations. Along with examining latest developments in the integrated formal structures for the formulation of international accounting principles, analyzing new accounting regulations and the extrapolating on the lessons that can be learned from the harmonization of accounting principles in Europe, this monograph provides the analyses of the convergence in both auditing and corporate governance as well as US perspective on IFRS adoption.

This book contains 53 nineteenth century American legal cases in which courts discussed accounting issues. Some are well known: Wood v. Drummer (1824) was the foundation for the idea that capital could not be returned to shareholders and it was this restriction which made it necessary to distinguish between income and capital. The famous case of 1849, Burnes v Pennell is often cited as the source of the rule that dividends cannot be paid except from profits. However, many of the cases covered in this book are not well-known. It is often assumed that few American legal cases on accounting matters were decided in the nineteenth century. However, many of the 53 cases included here preceded the earliest British legal cases that discussed accounting issues and they are interesting for several reasons. They show that government regulation of accounting pre-dated the modern regulatory ear. They also illustration that sometimes private contracts specified a particular accounting treatment and that accounting, therefore, served to define private rights. They also illustrate that American courts discussed accrual accounting problems as early as 1837 and that a cash concept of profits was not the norm.