Introduction

The Law Practice 2024 External Examination and Report must be completed by 31 May 2024.

The ToolBox is designed to assist Law Practices and External Examiners in the review of the trust account records and preparation of the Examination report for an individual law practice.

When the ToolBox questionnaire has been completed the Examiner must for each law practice examined:

- Ensure that the Part A and Part B statement has been lodged correctly, and

- Then transfer the EE report information from the Toolbox to the required format to submit the EE report – for NSW law practices the report will be lodged online via the NSW Law Society website.

The ToolBox for each law practice will remain open for amendment until the close of the current examination period.

Legal Profession Uniform Law and Rules

Under the Legal Profession Uniform Law (LPUL) and the Legal Profession Uniform General Rules 2015 a law practice is required to have its trust records externally examined once in each financial year, if it has received or held trust money, excluding Transit Money.

An external examination covers a law practice’s trust records from the beginning of April to the end of March in the following year.

The examination assesses the whether the law practice’s trust records have been maintained in compliance with the LPUL requirements. If you need to refresh your understanding of these requirements – the following documents provide an overview for law practices and Examiner’s.

How to use the ToolBox

The pre-examination questions, that is Toolbox Section 1 COMPLIANT SOFTWARE and Section 2 INTERVIEW, may be completed by the law practice OR the External Examiner.

The Toolbox sections / questions can be filtered based on responses recorded in Section 1 and 2. It is therefore important that these questions are responded to correctly to ensure the scope of the examination covers the key risk areas. If these responses are submitted by the law practice, the Examiner should review the information, BEFORE proceeding with the remainder of the examination questions, in the Toolbox.

Click to open each section of the questionnaire.

- Indicates that all required questions in a section of the Toolbox questionnaire, has been completed.

Question responses will be auto-saved when entered. However, you can also save each section as you complete the responses, by clicking the save working papers button.

When all question sections have been completed, proceed with preparation and submission of the EE report for the law practice, as required by the state regulatory body.

Any notifiable breaches will be highlighted in the Toolbox questionnaire. The EE can then copy and paste this information from the Toolbox to the online EE report lodgement website (for NSW law practices) for easy and accurate report preparation.

Print your completed ToolBox

All question responses, working papers, report and any documents uploaded, are securely saved within the Toolbox and will remain accessible by logging using the PIN, until 31st March 2024 (the start of the next examination period).

However, if you also wish to retain a copy of the ToolBox data as part of your working papers, click the working paper display button. Use your web browser print options to print to your local printer or as a PDF document.