Turning Nightmares into Daydreams through the mEasySoft Mobile App

It’s the divorce lawyer’s worst nightmare:  the judge looks at your papers during a conference and says, what if we change this one number?

Do you:

(a) Claim to be having an allergic reaction as you choke;

(b) Pull out a pencil and a calculator and try to slog through the math;

(c) Tell the judge you’ll be happy to do it back in your office to discuss at the next court conference; or,

(d) Pull out your tablet or smartphone and run the Easy Soft App to quickly provide the judge with the figures he’s requested?

Let Easy Soft turn the pace of modern technology to your client’s advantage with the mEasySoft FREE divorce settlement App.

If you’re an attorney in NJ, NY, PA, or AZ, simply prepare your support calculations in the comfort of your office using Easy Soft’s suite of family law software.  In every state, use Easy Soft’s Divorce Financials Software to prepare your divorce settlements.  Print out your crisp, clear worksheets, from networth statements to pension valuations for divorce, and get to court with confidence.

When the judge asks you to make that little change during the conference, simply smile, click on your Easy Soft divorce settlement App, change the number, and read the judge the new calculation right off your screen.

Next question:  what if you run into a technical problem using your Easy Soft divorce settlement App while you’re sitting in chambers? No worries.  Easy Soft provides the same great technical support for its phone and tablet applications as it does for all of its software products.  Easy Soft offers on-line help guides, technical videos, webinars, and, of course, live technical support staff. 

Easy Soft’s divorce financials App is like having your office in your pocket. 

Daydreams encouraged in your new no-sweat zone.

From Horseback to Internet, Facilitating Your Client Meetings in Cyberspace

In days of yore, lawyers rode out on horseback to meet with their clients.  Then, with the proliferation of automobiles, clients started driving into town to meet with their lawyer.  Now, as the pace of society quickens, attorneys and clients might meet once to sign the Retainer Agreement and not again until court appearances.

If your clientele has gone virtual, you need Easy Soft’s family law programs, which allow you to print and mail, or, save and e-mail your work product to your clients.

Easy Soft divorce settlement software gives you the option of saving a draft in Microsoft Word or as a .pdf.  As this two minute video of Easy Soft’s family law software will show you, the advantage of sending your client a Word document is that they can edit it.  By contrast, sending your client a .pdf document means they can’t edit the draft and it retains its appearance when it’s opened on a client’s phone, tablet, or PC.

This fluid, electronic communication feature found in Easy Soft’s family law software can also be used for drafts to opposing counsel of divorce settlement proposals and divorce settlement contracts.

Easy Soft’s family law software also gives you the option to receive information from your client that you can import into the program.  Just watch this five minute video to see how simple the Easy Soft family law software makes it for your client to communicate with you.  Simply provide your client with the Easy Soft family law software form.  Once it’s complete, your client e-mails it back to you.  You review it and import it directly into your Easy Soft family law program.

Both Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat .pdfs are the most utilized programs of their kind.  This means that you can send documents you produce with Easy Soft family law products to clients, attorneys, and judges without the recipient having to purchase or download Easy Soft products. 

With the Easy Soft suite of family law programs, it’s like having an office meeting with your client in cyberspace.

How Custom is Your Form?

The cliché among lawyers is that you can give the same fact pattern to five different judges and you’ll get five different outcomes.

But, let’s be candid.  Isn’t it equally true that we can give one case to five lawyers, and you’re going to give us five different divorce settlements?

Every lawyer likes to be original.  It’s part of the style that goes with the profession.  Call it ‘seeking a competitive edge.’

What if we told you that you could have the benefits of automated divorce settlement software with the perk of customizing the output to your liking?  Just click on this two minute video about Easy Soft’s divorce settlement software to see for yourself.

Easy Soft’s divorce settlement software couldn’t make your job easier.  Start with one entry of common data elements from mother, father, child essentials to budget items, to assets and liabilities.  Click on one button to select the form you want populated, and by the time you hit print you have a draft.  If the draft is to your liking, you’re done.

The Easy Soft divorce settlement software has quite a bit of flexibility already built in.  For example, would you prefer to show your client a “Tax Analysis Summary” using figures or a “Tax Analysis Summary Chart” using a bar graph?  Or, for example, would you like to show your client a stream of alimony payments over time or an alimony buyout figure?

But, if you still want to add a little personalization, Easy Soft uses Microsoft Word as its platform.  You can edit the Easy Soft draft document the same way you do any other Word document.  The big difference is that you don’t have to start from scratch when you’re working with any of the divorce settlement software from Easy Soft’s product suite.

With thousands of divorce lawyer clients, Easy Soft writes family law software based on what our attorneys tell us they want to see in divorce settlement software.  We even back our products with a 30-day money back guarantee.

Easy Soft may well be the one associate you can have in your office that doesn’t cramp your style.

How Antiquated is Your Math?

The pencil was a great invention in 1565.  The ballpoint pen, 1938.  Hand-held calculator, 1967.
But why are these antiques cluttering the top of your desk when you could have Easy Soft divorce software on your desktop?

Put down your pencil and pick up Easy Soft, the divorce software with automated financial calculations.
With Easy Soft’s programs, you can benefit from automatic divorce calculations that will cut your work from hours into minutes, while improving your accuracy.

Perhaps you are using EzSupport-NY and you’re entering assets and liabilities into the NY networth statement – three cars, one house with a mortgage and a home equity line of credit, one time-share, and five credit cards.  Erase any thought of using scrap paper on the side.  By the time you’ve entered this information into this divorce settlement software, it’s already added up.  Before you can click on print, accurate totals are ready to go for your networth statement.

Or let’s say you’re using EzSupport-PA and you want to make a PA child support calculation.  Simply input the income of each party, filing status, exemptions, and non-standard deductions, and let this software run the PA child support calculation through the statutory formula.   If you want to see variations, go ahead and change variables like the number of overnights per year and simply click on ‘compare.”  This PA family law software will instantly show you a worksheet comparing any changes against the original input information.

All of Easy Soft’s family law software maximizes the computer’s automation of routine math calculations for budgets, assets, liabilities, and support calculations.

You might not make a mistake on 2 + 2 = 4.  But, do you really want to take a chance that you’ll end up having to erase that $5,437.82 + $6,248.23 = $10,686.05 after you already divided it by 2 and got $5,343.03, instead of $5,843.03?  For the price to your client of that one mistake, you could have purchased Easy Soft’s divorce settlement software and had both money and piece-of-mind to spare.

The Uncommon Solution for Common Data Repetition

If legislatures were lawyer-friendly, they would develop one, comprehensive form for the universal data of every divorce case.

Instead, lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, and parties must fill in numerous forms, containing largely repetitive information.  Name of each party, Name of each child, Date of birth and Social Security Numbers for all.  From captions to signature lines, the repetition of data in divorce cases is mind-numbing.

Fortunately, what the legislatures won’t do, Easy Soft has done, and that’s eliminate the repetition.  With Easy Soft’s divorce settlement program, only once do you have to input core information for each case.  This divorce settlement software populates all the repetitions of the same information into each one of the different forms.

Let’s take an example from the Arizona family law forms program.  This divorce settlement program generates all of its forms from a common set of data.  You only have to enter once the information for the mother, father, children, addresses, date of marriage, attorneys, and other common data.

Then, you go to the family documents section, select the form you want to produce and this family law software will merge your data set into the selected form.  If you haven’t filled in all the necessary fields, you’ll get a reminder from this family law program to complete the remaining information.

What do you do if you’re using Easy Soft’s Pennsylvania family law software, and ‘Michelle’ is misspelled ‘Michele’ or ‘Alan’ is misspelled ‘Allen?’  Instead of having to go line-by-line through each document, hoping that you’ll spot all the errors, simply go back to the family law program’s common document data set and make your correction in one field, one time.  This universal correction feature saves you both time and money because “fix error” is not what any client wants to see as a billable time charge.

With Easy Soft’s divorce settlement software feature of single entry for commonly used data, you can stop repeating yourself and start efficiently moving your cases forward.

Paying the Firm from Advance Retainer Deposits - Efficiently and Ethically

Lawyers have a unique opportunity when it comes to getting paid: the advance retainer deposit.

So why is it that lawyers don’t capitalize on the opportunity to have money in a trust account before doing any work for their clients?

If you think that you don’t need time and billing software for attorneys, ask yourself if you can accurately say how much money each client has on deposit with your law office right now.

When your primary focus is meeting your responsibility to your clients, you often forget about your responsibility to be profitable - which is why you need Easy Soft’s “Easy TimeBill” and “Easy Trust” software products.  You can keep your firm in the black using this combination of billing software for attorneys and trust accounting software for attorneys.

Easy Soft’s trust accounting software for attorneys you enter amounts of advance retainer deposits made by clients, manage disbursements, and see reminders to ask clients to refresh their advance retainer deposits.

When you use the trust accounting software for attorneys with the Easy Soft billing software for attorneys, you see information about the client’s advance retainer deposit balance each time you start billing on a client file.  This integrated use of two legal billing and accounting software products means that you will always know whether your client has enough  money on deposit to pay for the work you are about to perform.

At Easy Soft, our products are designed specifically for attorneys.  We know that there are several critical steps involved in legal billing and accounting software, and our software is designed to help you meet those ethics requirements.

If you want to ensure that your law firm is using an automated, systematic approach to billing and trust accounting, you need to implement Easy Soft’s law office billing software.  To do anything else might just be objectionable.

Time is Money – Don’t Waste It!

Time is Money.  How often have we heard that cliché?

Phrases become clichés because they represent simple truths, in this case, that a lawyer can only earn as much as gets billed to clients.

So why do many lawyers insist on trying to remember to handwrite time slips on bits of paper that get lost in the wash?

At Easy Soft,we’re willing to bet that if you purchase our time and billing software for attorneys, you’ll notice an improvement in your bottom line.If not, you have our 30-day, unconditional, money-back guarantee on this law office billing software.

Take a moment to get an overview of “Easy TimeBill” law office billing software, watch a short video, download a free trial, and go ahead and buy the program.  Questions before buying?   Just call us at Easy Soft at 800-905-7638 and ask whatever questions you may have about our time and billing software for attorneys.

The screens for the Easy Soft time and billing software for attorneys are simple, fill-in fields that include client name, matter, work description, billing rate, and a start-stop clock or manual time entry.  If you are sitting at your desk, simply start this billing software for attorneys, make less than one minute of entries, click on the clock and you’re billing.  You can also make manual entries, such as for expenses.  This law office billing software was designed specifically for attorneys and law office staff.

At the end of the month, all you have to do is print and mail your invoices.  This Billing Software for Attorneys has already computed the billable charge, totaled all time and expense charges, and compiled the same matters into individual bills.

We know that changing a routine approach to billing is going to take some persuading and some support, and that’s why we’re here.  So, instead of rummaging through your pockets and purses for last month’s receipts, why not save yourself some real money by investing in Easy Soft’s Attorney Billing Software – today.  After all, time is a wastin’.

How Useful is Your Networth Statement?

Whether your client is worth of $1,000 or $1 million, no mandatory case document is more important than the networth statement .

In every one of the fifty states, the networth statement is the document that contains basic information about the parties and their children, household budgets, assets, and liabilities. The networth statement is the directory to all things financial for every divorce case.

No matter how many pages of financial statements you have, a complete networth statement is critical for fast courtroom responses. If you're standing in a courtroom in New Jersey and the judge asks “How much is Mary's checking account worth,” you should be reaching for Easy Soft's NJ Case Information Sheet . Your ability to respond quickly can make the difference of whether the judge listens to you or your steal-the-show opposing counsel.

Need another reason? Credibility determinations are often made on the basis of the quality of presentation of the networth statement . If you're a judge in New York, which would you be more likely to believe: a networth statement that was computer-generated using Easy Soft's NY Statement of Net Worth or one that was handwritten with math mistakes? With each case that you present using Easy Soft's divorce settlement software your individual client's credibility grows and so does yours, and that same credibility can translate into real dollars and cents for your client.

And how many times have you seen the judge rifling through the networth statement , whether during a motion, in a conference, or at trial? In Arizona, Exhibits B through Q might be hundreds of pages of financial statements, but your judge should be making notes on Exhibit A, Easy Soft's AZ Affidavit of Financial Information. Stenographers read along with the networth statement when your client is giving testimony. And judges' law clerks make the first draft of decisions with those networth statements on their already-cramped desk.

While there isn't a substitute for obtaining primary source financial documents, every state requires attorneys to boil down the stacks of numbers into the networth statement .

Shouldn't you be sure that your client's networth statement is as useful as the ones produced with Easy Soft?

The mighty, mandatory networth statement

The mighty, mandatory networth statement is designed to capture every penny of every expense, asset, and liability associated with the parties that should be distributed between them as part of the settlement or judicial outcome. One format or another of the networth statement is required in all fifty states.
Although the networth statement came into vogue across the country in the 1980s as a way to protect non-monied spouses, it hasn't been used to its potential. It is common practice for attorneys to hand a blank networth statement to their assistant or to their client, later to give it only a cursory glance before it is signed.
Now, Easy Soft is changing the way attorneys think about and use the networth statement . Using Easy Soft's divorce settlement software , the cumbersome networth statement turns into an electronic think pad for every aspect of divorce settlement negotiations and courtroom presentations.
Let's take an example for a client in New Jersey. Easy Soft offers New Jersey's #1 family law program, compliant with 2011 statutory mandates. With simple, fill-in fields that you complete on your computer, this family law software not only adds up the assets and liabilities, it computes the total equitable distribution to each party, the percentage distribution to each party, and highlights any shortfalls or surpluses to achieve your target equitable distribution.
This powerful networth statement software is specialized for NJ, NY, PA, and AZ . For all states, Easy Soft offers divorce financials software that includes asset/liability distribution forms, along with other financial tools.
Because Easy Soft's divorce networth statement is so simple to use, you'll find yourself consistently making updates to it throughout the case as more financial information becomes available from your client, through discovery, or by subpoena. Don't let financial documents stuff the drawers of your filing cabinets when you can make it an active part of your case using this integrated divorce settlement software .
Your settlement negotiation charts generated through this divorce settlement software can contain accurate and up-to-date financial information. Enhance the distribution to your client using Easy Soft's divorce settlement software .

The Indecisive Support Recipient

“I don’t know what I want – you tell me.”
How many times do divorce attorneys hear these words spoken by clients when what the client really means is: “Get me everything you can, and then some.”
So how do you help your client make a decision on child support and alimony, so that you’ll have the authorization you need to start settlement negotiations and make presentations to the court?
The answer to this client problem is as simple as using the Easy Soft “Divorce Financials Software” to show your client the most strategic child support calculation and alimony calculation.  Using this divorce settlement program, you can put your client in the position to set the child support and alimony goals for the case.
Using Easy Soft’s divorce settlement program couldn’t be easier.  Start with the input of basic financial information about each party’s income, tax filing status, state of residency, and children qualified as dependency/exemptions.  Divorce Financials Software already contains all federal and state income tax tables to save your client the expense of having you look up that information and performing those calculations by hand.
Your next step is probably going to be the child support calculation and the alimony calculation as per the guidelines in the state of the divorce.  For NJ residents, Easy Soft’s “Case Information Program” will perform support calculations for you and seamlessly integrate them into the divorce settlement program.  Easy Soft also offers NY child support calculators and NY alimony calculators, PA child support calculators and PA alimony calculators, and AZ child support calculators and AZ alimony calculators.  Support figures can be manually entered for any state.
Next, input up to five, different child support calculations and alimony calculations for comparison purposes.  For example, you might choose to increase alimony in $2,000 increments and/or decrease child support in corresponding increments.
Then, with one click of a button, Easy Soft’s Divorce Financials Software produces easy-to-read charts, with side-by-side columns, so that your client can understand the effective budget in up to five, different support scenarios.  This software even shows you the after-tax value of alimony payments to the recipient.
You can even print and/or e-mail these charts from Divorce Financials Software to share with your client.
You’re going to find that indecisive client isn’t so indecisive any more.

Making your 1099S List - and checking it twice or Five Times

It’s that time of year again. Time for settlement agents all across the country to file 1099-S forms

to the IRS. As with your taxes, the longer you wait, the more painful things get. So don’t wait.

Filing the statements in a timely manner has become even more critical given new Tier-3 penalty rates. Here’s how it breaks down:

·         1099s (not to be confused with 1099S’s) need to be filed by January 31, 2012. We mention this since the similar form number makes things rife for confusion.

·         You have till February 15, 2012 to file your 1099S’s. We believe the IRS provides a slightly longer timeframe since the forms are so complex. Note: you’ll want to check and double-check your work. Make sure there are no typos. Make sure names match tax ID numbers. You could end up paying dearly for discrepancies!

·         The IRS reporting deadline is March 31, 2012. When this deadline comes around, the IRS will be able to verify the underlying information, and notify you of errors.

·         If you haven’t corrected your 1099S mistakes within 30 days, it’s considered a Tier-1 penalty, and you will be assessed accordingly. This is a sham, and we’ll explain why in a minute.

·         If you haven’t corrected your 1099S mistakes within 60 days, it’s a Tier-2 penalty, and you’ll be assessed accordingly. We believe this is a sham, too. Keep reading.

·         You get 180 days to correct a mistake and pay a Tier-3 penalty of $100. The reason this - in our opinion - is the only realistic penalty is that the IRS is sifting through a lot of forms. The agency will take a few months before informing the filer about a mismatch in the first place. Therefore, too much time will have passed for you to return a corrected form in time to qualify for the Tier-1 and Tier-2 penalties. Tier-3 is only option left.

Once again, your Tier-3 errors will cost you a cool $100: each. If you’re filing the average number of forms (somewhere in the neighborhood of 50) for settlement agents, they’ll surely hunt you down. We are talking about a nation in debt.

Now for the good news. Here at Easy Soft, we’re happy to handle your filings for you. All you have to do is sign up for our 1099S electronic filing service. You handle the closing. Then give us the dirty work of filing the forms. We’ll be the ones making your list - and checking it twice (or five times). We’ll be the ones keeping our eyes on that February 15 deadline. Your work - as far as we’re concerned - is done!

Easy, right? The 1099S electronic filing service is part of Easy Soft’s Easy HUD software package. For more information, give us a call at 800-905-7638.