Law Firm Spotlight: Smith & Eulo Law Firm

Welcome to the LawPay Client Spotlight! This month, we’re excited to feature the Smith & Eulo Law Firm in Orlando, Florida.

What type of law do you primarily practice? We practice criminal defense and personal injury.

What makes your practice unique? We try to be approachable, conversational, and accessible to our clients. They have our cell phone numbers and we want them to feel like we’re friends that they can talk to about their concerns. We’re also younger than most attorneys in our field, so we like to think we’re more relatable.

What is your approach/philosophy in your work? We truly believe every case matters. We aim to provide the best possible representation for each and every client, and try to practice good communication. We’ve found that bad communication is a common complaint with criminal lawyers, so we make efforts to rectify that.

How has LawPay benefited your practice? LawPay has been our “go-to” resource for payments. We started using it right from the beginning, after hearing about it through the Florida Bar. We did look into some other payment providers, but no other service really caters to an attorney’s needs like LawPay does. LawPay really understands that clients need trust account protection.

We love that LawPay can be customized to blend in with our firm’s branding and aesthetic. It looks like our LawPay payment page is part of our business, as opposed to a third-party service. Some clients may be hesitant to pay you online if you send them to an external PayPal link. With LawPay, clients trust paying us and trust that their money is going to the right place.

Did you try other payment processors before using LawPay? What was your experience with them? In the past, we found that other credit card processors were not very effective communicators, and would give us generic responses to our questions. For example, past processor companies would simply notify us that a charge had been disputed or that a card could not be accepted.

In comparison, Law Pay will always provide a detailed explanation and will go out of their way to provide quick and thorough communication to help rectify the situation. For example, we recently had a potential client who attempted to pay for representation with a credit card while they were out of the country. I was able to get in touch with LawPay right away and was able to communicate the problem. Within minutes, the problem was fixed and we were able to receive payment from our new client.

Furthermore, the majority of payment processors on the market do not know how to deal with the unique challenges of law firm accounting. One major problem is that a lot of payment processors are not in compliance with the state bar association rules for law firm trust accounting. Many of them do not have an efficient system in place to separate operating account payments from trust account payments, resulting in potential comingling of funds with the operating and trust account—a huge no no with the Florida Bar.

LawPay is the only payment processing tool we found that is in compliance with the Florida Bar, and also creates clear separation to ensure operating account and trust account payments stay separate.

Are there any features of LawPay that have stood out to you? The Scheduled Payments feature is very convenient, as we have 100+ clients signed up on payment plans for their cases. It is often tough to keep track of payment dates, as they can be staggered throughout the month depending on when the client initially signs on with our firm. LawPay’s Scheduled Payments feature allows us to set the payment dates in advance for recurring payments, minimizing the risk of past due or missed payments. This “set it and forget it” approach is an awesome tool for our high volume practice.

You can find Smith & Eulo Law Firm at https://www.smithandeulo.com