Neal,
The new person you hired appears to be unfamiliar with handling attorney accounts. Neither of us need to be hung up on mishandling stuff like this so please provide her guidance.
I have reviewed the applicable VA regs myself to ensure that I also have the proper understanding and based upon that and other research please see the following:
I was presented each telephone bill as they came in on a monthly basis and identified the expenses to be attributed. I am not sure what happened to that paperwork, but suffice it to say I am certain I did not skip over 6,000 dollars in phone charges and I doubt you missed this as well.
With regard to the last trip I broke out the amounts on the phone bill and I reconciled with Bethany. It is my understanding that each client had been invoiced the amount and this could be considered to be double billing. I don’t know what happened but this is going to require me to go through all of the relevant invoices to validate the bills.
I did no work for Hashimy in one of the months. I was trying to ensure he paid you the 50k he owed the firm. I told him we would credit him on the phone bill (what wound up to be about 2k if I recall of the phone bill toward that months bill) I will also note that of the close to 200k in fees I had never previously credited him. I ensured that he made what appeared to be his remaining payment even after I left the firm with no obligation to do so which was not acknowledged. I know that Bethany was aware of that and I believe I remember that she conveyed that to you. If you want to override that concession then go ahead but don’t attribute it to my oversight because that’s not true.
I would advise against providing the client phone bills with other client information in it as I would construe that to be protected information.
Way ahead – I need all of the invoices associated with Hashimy and the AT&T bills and any other invoice that contained phone charges so that I can determine what the right number is because right now I cannot concur in the number you have derived. This will obviously take some time to sort through.
A couple of other items for efficiency sake:
Please remit the amounts for the following clients:
Drilow, Gary - $ 1500.00 of $3000.00 unearned fees
Mata, Marin - $ 5000.00 of $5000.00 unearned fees
Middleton, Jeremy - $ 3500.00 of $5000.00 unearned fees
Hoffman-McHale, Catherine - $ 2500.00 of $5000.00 unearned fees
I was informed that this had been reviewed and taken care of. I think you will find that these estimates are very conservative. If there is a dispute on a client then please provide an itemized client billing as required.
R/
Eric S. Montalvo
Founding Partner
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