Resolution and money: capabilities and limits

Time, rates and the bill

• Four answers about how a matter bills, never two

  A fee-terms read answers four ways: it did not finish; prior terms exist but none governs; none is recorded; or here are the terms. Collapsing the first two once billed real work at nothing. Eight arrangement types price, and amendments are append-only rows.

• The rounding is recorded beside the minutes it came from

  One canonical write for billable time: form, timer and assistant obey one rule set. The rate resolves case, client, activity, firm default, in that stated order. The minimum increment rounds up beside the raw minutes, and the database computes the amount, so inserting one errors.

• An approval the author cannot give

  Approving an entry takes a licensed attorney at its own firm who is not its author, on the predicate trust dual control uses. It stays dormant until a firm turns it on, and only approved time sweeps onto an invoice. An unreadable approver probe refuses.

• A price only the firm wrote

  No default, no placeholder, no zero: a unit whose kind is off the firm's menu stays unpriced, named with its reason. Pricing reads the menu in force when the work finished, reports overlapping cards, and mints a recurring period once, under a unique index.

The bill, and what it rests on

• An invoice whose lines say what they rest on

  Shipped

  A gate receipt and a typed tenth of an hour get different words. Four results: pass, fail, absent, not checked. A line with nothing behind it reads unproved, the anchor tier follows the status read, and two lines on one work unit lose the grade.

• Three e-billing formats, and an export that refuses rather than rounds

  LEDES 1998B at 24 fields, 98BI V2 at 52, XML 2.04 on a documented subset. Money validates as exact decimal integers, so a fractional cent, unreconciled subtotal or unsupported tax refuses by name, writing no file. Tax ships as a hard zero, unsourced fields blank.

• One AI line, or none

  Whether AI work reaches a bill is the fee arrangement's answer. Flat, unit-menu and premium matters absorb it; a contingency with nothing disclosed in writing gets no line, a fee term ABA Model Rule 1.5(c) wants recorded. An agreed ceiling is read before the sweep.

• What a client's bill may contain, and when a total says partial

  Invoice line items are free-form JSON carrying internal identifiers, so the portal reads a named column list and filters it at the boundary. Across matters every figure carries whether it could be read; one that could not labels the total partial and names the matter.

Trust money

• Atomicity bought back on purpose, with the overdraw raise inside it

  Shipped

  The database layer here has no transactions, so two functions buy real ones for money: a row lock, and a raise refusing a posting that would take a matter or client below zero. Amounts are whole cents, and a figure that would round is refused.

• Two people on an outflow, and one predicate saying who the second may be

  Dual control sleeps until a firm sets a threshold and holds outflows only: gating a deposit would keep client funds off the record. It gates the types the SQL signs negative; every lane asks first. One predicate, at the approval's firm, says who may approve.

• Three-way reconciliation reported as a pair

  Shipped

  Bank, book and the summed client sub-balances, reconciled in the database, recorded as matched plus discrepancy. A missing bank figure is never a zero reading as reconciled. The discrepancy is a magnitude over the worst leg, so commingling cannot hide behind a tied bank leg.

• A walled matter keeps its amount and loses its caption

  Every row in a pooled account stays, with its amount, running balance, date and reference number, a screened matter losing only its identity: no case, no client, no narrative. The withholding is stated on the row, never blank, and an unreadable register withholds every row.

Settling

• A negotiation ledger priced at the time

  Every demand, offer, counter, acceptance, rejection and withdrawal is an immutable row carrying the valuation band as it stood that day, since a mutable snapshot would plot today's band against last spring's offer. A correction is a new row superseding the old, cycle-guarded.

• Statement math that moves nothing, and deductions that trace to a row

  Shipped

  Gross, fees, costs, liens and net, as a pure function moving no funds. A lien costs the negotiated figure, else the asserted, nothing if waived; a referral division sits inside the attorney fee. Provider rows carry the received-through attestation, sum live, reading undetermined when absent.

• Closing statements frozen at signature, and payees proposed rather than re-keyed

  Shipped

  An approved statement proposes per-payee disbursements into the dual-control queue, every payee resolving to a record that exists now. Sharing for signature pins the version, so a proposal against a later edit refuses. An amendment is a new statement, and approval writes no money field.

Signature

• One signing surface, ordered signers, sealed when the last one signs

  Shipped

  Signing runs in-house; its flag turns signing off, never hands it to a vendor. The send route runs the whole gate stack first. Signers wait their turn in a durable queue, no packet seals short of every signature, the certificate names intent, consent and attribution.

• Verification that names its own tier

  Shipped

  Anyone holding an executed PDF hashes it in their own browser and learns whether these bytes are the bytes that were sealed, and which tier stands behind the answer: Bitcoin-confirmed, pending, or digest only. The tier is stated rather than implied.

Limits

• Trust records are immutable and retained. There are no hard deletes and no editing a posted entry.
• A net recovery can be negative, and the statement shows it rather than flooring it at zero.
• BRON authors no price. Every figure on a bill is one the firm wrote or one the record captured, and a kind with no price on the menu is named as a gap rather than filled in.
• Two-person approval is dormant until a firm sets a threshold. A firm that has not set one posts every disbursement on a single approval, and the settings page says so in a sentence rather than showing an empty field.
• The e-billing exports are checked against a documented subset written here. Certification against the official schema, and acceptance by a client's billing vendor, are unverified.
• These are the firm's own books, kept for the firm. Nothing here is accounting advice, and a reconciliation record is not a substitute for the firm's own review.

What BRON refuses

• Disburse contingency funds without the client's completed signature.

  Florida Bar Rule 4-1.5(f)(5), enforced on the one proposal endpoint under three codes: the fee arrangement could not be read, so whether the rule applies is unknown; no statement document is attached; or no completed signature matches this matter's client. A captured mark, a signed-at stamp, a sent row, or an envelope waiting on another signer is not completion. A matter outside Florida exits before the query.

• Price the work when it cannot read its own terms.

  A timed-out read that collapsed into no data once put real work on an invoice at nothing, and because the amount column is generated, the database itself wrote the zero. The engine now refuses in every direction: an arrangement it cannot resolve, a prior charge it cannot sum, a ceiling it cannot check.

• Fall back to application code when the database function is absent.

  It fails closed with a service error. The instinct to retry the posting in JavaScript is the original bug, and the row lock and the overdraw raise live inside the function rather than around it.

• Let a person re-key payees between two screens.

  Reading an approved statement on one screen and typing it into another is how a transposed digit becomes a client's money in the wrong place, in a ledger that makes it permanent. The approved record proposes its own lines instead, and every one of them still waits on a second attorney.

• Repair a statement that does not balance.

  The arithmetic was reviewed and approved by a person; the bridge carries those exact figures or stops. Quietly closing a twelve-dollar gap would be disbursing a number nobody approved, which is the re-key it replaces, only faster and harder to see.

• Put a price on a line nobody authored.

  A proven unit whose kind is not on the firm's menu stays unpriced and is named with its reason. A gap is an ask, not a discount, and a zero on an invoice is a price like any other.

• Charge for AI work a flat price already covers, or on a contingency matter with nothing disclosed in writing.

  The posture comes from the arrangement, and ABA Model Rule 1.5(c) wants a contingency fee term recorded. A read that cannot finish is could not determine, never nothing to exclude, because the fail-open direction here is a client paying twice with nothing on the bill to notice.

• Certify a trust reconciliation with no bank figure.

  Matched false at a discrepancy of zero is not certifiable, and it must never share a value with reconciled to the cent. A discarded read error once turned a failed account read into this firm has no trust accounts, every leg collapsed to zero at once, and the route minted a permanent, uneditable Rule 1.15 record certifying a match nobody performed.

• Arm two-person approval at a firm that cannot satisfy it.

  The screen that sets the threshold and the route that releases a held disbursement ask one question, so a threshold the firm cannot meet is refused when it is set rather than when a client is waiting on funds.

• Export an invoice the file cannot carry.

  Recorded tax outside the subset, a payment already applied, a negative line, a duration that will not express in hundredths of an hour, an itemization past the bound: each is named and no file is written. An invented rate on a document a client pays against is a misrepresentation.

What is this line for, does the trust math tie, and what happens when it does not?

Trace recorded time into the bill, review trust movements and carry the negotiation into a signed closing statement. Dual-control fund releases and database-enforced arithmetic keep financial decisions attached to the people and records behind them.

Inputs

• Time, expenses and the firm's own rate cards
• The fee arrangement the firm authored
• Approved capability runs and their gate receipts
• Valuation and the settlement posture
• Liens, treating providers and third-party claims

Outputs

• The trust ledger and its reconciliation
• The client portal
• E-billing, in the format the payer accepts
• The signed closing statement
• The audit chain