In 2026 the State Bar randomly selected 400 California attorneys for a mandatory trust account review. If you are selected, you hire a State Bar approved CPA at your own expense, $10,000 to $25,000, and they examine your monthly three-way reconciliations, 14-day client notifications, and 45-day disbursements. IOLTAWatch runs those first three, automatically, so the records exist before anyone asks for them.
The mandatory review covers your reconciliations, notification timing, disbursement timing, and recordkeeping under Rule 1.15. IOLTAWatch does not sit the exam for you. It keeps the underlying records current and flagged, so if you are selected you are producing a file, not reconstructing a year of history from bank statements.
CTAPP took effect December 1, 2022. It layers annual registration, a self-assessment, and a written certification on top of the Rule 1.15 duties every California attorney already carries. Miss the window and the consequence is not a fine, it is your status.
Register every trust account with the State Bar, complete the self-assessment against Rule 1.15, and certify compliance in writing. All three are due February 1, aligned with bar dues.
An attorney who has not met the CTAPP obligations by April 1 is moved to involuntary inactive status. Inactive means you cannot practice.
The State Bar launched mandatory trust account compliance reviews. This is enforcement with a CPA attached, not a self-reported checkbox.
Selection is random, so a clean history is no protection. Each selected attorney hires a State Bar approved CPA at their own expense, $10,000 to $25,000 per review.
You link the account one time. IOLTAWatch handles the nightly reconciliation, the deadline flags, and the PDF archive. There is no new accounting platform to learn and no IT lift.
Link your California IOLTA account through a bank-grade read-only connection in under two minutes. Read-only means we can see transactions and can never move money.
Each deposit and disbursement is matched to the correct client sub-ledger. The three-way reconciliation runs nightly, and 14-day notification and 45-day idle-funds flags surface the moment a deadline is in play.
Reconciliation PDFs and a timestamped audit log are archived for the five-year retention window, and a CTAPP reminder lands before the February 1 deadline. If a review comes, the file already exists.
No tiers, no seat math, no surprise upgrade when you take on your fifteenth client matter. Cancel anytime, and your archived reconciliations stay yours.
For solo and small California firms, 1 to 5 attorneys.
Billed monthly. 30-day money-back guarantee. Cancel anytime.
Built around California Rule 1.15 and the CTAPP obligations.
The math is not close. A single mandatory review, if you are one of the 400, costs more than a decade of IOLTAWatch. And the review goes better when the reconciliations, notifications, and disbursement timing were tracked all along instead of reconstructed under a deadline.
To be exact about the line: registration, the self-assessment, and the certification are filed by the attorney directly with the State Bar, and IOLTAWatch does not determine whether funds are disputed. IOLTAWatch tracks, flags, reminds, and keeps the records a reviewer requests in one place. The filing and the legal judgment stay with you.
No, and any product that promises that is overselling. CTAPP compliance means you registered your trust accounts, completed the self-assessment, and certified in writing to the State Bar, and it means your actual trust accounting follows Rule 1.15. Those filings are yours to make. What IOLTAWatch does is keep the underlying records (reconciliations, notification timing, disbursement timing) current and audit-ready, so the reconciliation portion of a review is a non-event and your February 1 self-assessment is grounded in real data.
You hire a State Bar approved CPA at your own expense, typically $10,000 to $25,000, and they examine your monthly three-way reconciliations, 14-day notifications, 45-day disbursements, and recordkeeping. IOLTAWatch does not replace that CPA. It means the records they ask for already exist, timestamped and archived, instead of being rebuilt from a year of bank statements.
No. Registration, the self-assessment, and the certification are filed by the attorney directly with the State Bar. IOLTAWatch sends you a reminder ahead of the February 1 deadline and keeps your reconciliation records ready, but it does not submit anything to the State Bar on your behalf.
Correct, we cannot, and we do not pretend to. IOLTAWatch flags any matter that still holds a balance and has had no ledger activity since a deposit, as a proxy for the 45-day clock. Whether those specific funds are undisputed and ready to distribute is a legal judgment only you can make. We surface the clock. You apply the judgment.
The connection is bank-grade and read-only. IOLTAWatch can see transactions to build the reconciliation, and it can never move money. Your login credentials are never stored by us.
