Practice Management Software for Ireland Solicitors (2026)

Every Irish solicitor handling client money must comply with the Solicitors Accounts Regulations 2023, which came into force on 1 July 2023 and replace the 2014 regulations.

Key requirements:

• Client funds must be held in a designated client account at an authorised credit institution in Ireland, clearly separated from office account funds.
• Balancing statements must now be prepared every three months (previously six months), reconciling the client ledger against the bank balance.
• The authorised signatory on the client account must be a solicitor who is a partner or sole practitioner holding a current practising certificate — non-solicitors cannot be sole signatories on client cheques or electronic transfers without written Law Society authorisation.
• Any client ledger balance outstanding for 2 years or more must be listed at Appendix 6 of the Reporting Accountant's report, with the reason and any action taken.
• Reporting Accountants file annually, and the Law Society's Financial Regulation team conducts investigations and inspections.

Modern practice management software should automate three-month balancing, flag dormant balances, and produce an export ready for the Reporting Accountant.

Irish solicitors must provide clients with a written Section 150 notice (under the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015) at the start of a matter, setting out either the actual fee or — where that is not possible — the basis on which fees will be charged, plus disbursements and VAT.

Best practice for billing:

• Track time in 6-minute units (the conventional billing increment) so partial-hour entries map cleanly to bills.
• Use clear narratives — clients (and Legal Costs Adjudicators on a costs adjudication) want to see what was done, by whom, and why.
• Itemise disbursements (Companies Registration Office fees, search fees, counsel fees, stamp duty) separately from professional fees.
• Show VAT at 23% as a separate line on every invoice — see the VAT section below.
• Issue updated Section 150 notices when the scope of work materially changes, before the additional work is done.

The Law Society of Ireland's 2026 CPD Cycle runs from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2026. The total requirement was bumped up to 25 hours of CPD for all practising solicitors.

Within those 25 hours, every solicitor must complete:

• A minimum of 5 hours of Professional Development and Solicitor Wellbeing (PDSW).
• A minimum of 3 hours of Client Care and Professional Standards (sole practitioners, Compliance Partners and AML Compliance Partners have a related but slightly different sub-allocation).

The remaining hours are general CPD across substantive law, skills, and management topics.

Keep a contemporaneous record. The Law Society conducts random CPD audits and you must be able to produce certificates of attendance and category breakdowns on request. EZ@Work's CPD tracker logs each course, its category, the provider, and hours — and warns you in November if you are short.

To practise as a solicitor in Ireland you must:

• Be enrolled on the Roll of Solicitors maintained by the Law Society.
• Hold a current Practising Certificate (PC), renewed annually by 1 February.
• Hold Professional Indemnity Insurance (PII) to the minimum level required — currently €1.5 million per claim through a Qualifying Insurer in the SMDF/QIS framework.
• Be registered with the Legal Services Regulatory Authority (LSRA) for complaints handling purposes (LSRA now handles complaints, transferred from the Law Society in 2019).

Non-compliance — late PC renewal, lapsed PII, missed CPD — can result in suspension. Set calendar reminders well before each deadline, or use a practice management system that tracks renewals at the firm level.

Irish legal services are taxable at the standard rate of 23% under Irish Revenue rules. This applies to fees charged by solicitors, barristers, and other legal advisors.

A compliant Irish VAT invoice from a solicitor must include:

• Sequential invoice number — never reuse, never skip.
• Issue date and supply date.
• Your firm's name, address and VAT number.
• Client name, address, and client VAT number where the reverse charge applies.
• Description of services rendered.
• Net fee (professional charges).
• VAT at 23% shown as a separate amount.
• Disbursements that pass through as agent (search fees, court stamps) shown separately and outside the VAT calculation.
• Total including VAT.

Legal services to business clients established outside Ireland are typically zero-rated (B2B reverse charge under EU VAT rules). Keep documentary evidence of the client's establishment.

Pitfall 1: Mixing client money with office money. Even temporarily depositing client funds into the office account is a serious breach. Use a system that forces a transfer-from-client-to-office entry every time you take fees from a client balance.

Pitfall 2: Late three-monthly balancing. Under the 2023 Regulations, balancing must be done every 3 months — not 6. Firms still on a 6-month rhythm are out of compliance.

Pitfall 3: Missing Section 150 notices. Issuing a bill without having first given a Section 150 notice exposes your fee to a successful client complaint or LSRA referral.

Pitfall 4: Treating disbursements as if they carry VAT. Genuine disbursements (court fees, Land Registry fees, CRO fees paid as agent for the client) are outside the scope of VAT. Adding 23% to them is an overcharge.

Pitfall 5: Forgetting dormant client balances. Any ledger balance outstanding 2+ years must be listed and explained in the Reporting Accountant's report. Run a quarterly dormant-balances review.

Many Irish firms still run on desktop-era systems (Keyhouse, OSG, older Iken Cloud installs) and find themselves locked into per-user licences that scale poorly for a 2-3 solicitor practice.

A clean migration to a modern cloud system follows four steps:

• Export your client ledger in CSV with one row per posting (date, ledger code, narrative, dr, cr, balance). Most systems can produce this; if not, ask the vendor for an SQL extract.
• Reconcile the export to the live bank balance before importing — you do not want to inherit historic discrepancies.
• Import in stages: open matters first, then closed matters from the last 7 years (the document retention minimum), then archive the rest read-only.
• Run parallel for one full month — issue bills from both systems and confirm they match before cutting over.

EZ@Work supports CSV import of client and office ledgers and provides a guided migration checklist tailored for the Solicitors Accounts Regulations.