Payments Solution for Courts
Court administrators can offer clients the convenience of online and different payments while increasing your collection all while perfectly integrating with your existing case management and financial systems.
LegalAtoms is the most comprehensive payments solution for courts built on the next generation of payment infrastructure in 2022.
LegalAtoms is cloud-based service built on a very secure platform.
Features
- Clerks can provide a fee schedule for each case type (e.g. based on statutory requirements) and service so the correct fees are charged for each filing type
- LegalAtoms provides a "Shopping Cart" like mechanism for end users to pay for multiple fees or charges e.g. certified copies, filing fees, or fines with a single transaction
- There are extensibility points to interface with a court's other vendors handling payments receipts and payments.
- LegalAtoms provides fee payments to be automatically calculated and processed at the end of the business day for governmental end users who currently utilize vouchers
- Refunds are supported.
- Discount codes can be provided
- Established workflow for processing IFP waivers
Credit, Debit, Checks, Paypal, Venmo and Bond
Courts can increase payments collected by offering relevant payment methods to your customers who are now using a range of new payment methods besides just a credit or debit card.
- Credit Cards: Visa , Mastercard , American Express , Discover & Diners
- Bank Transfers (ACH), Wires and Debit Cards
- Digital Wallets: Venmo, Paypal, Google Pay, Microsoft Pay
- Checks: Accept and pay via checks including: issue, print, reprint, void and escheat checks. Checks can be deposited by mail. Your customer uses the LegalAtoms-provided invoice number and PO box address and the payments will appear on your screens.
Payment flexibility
- Pay in installments: Offer clients to pay their fines in installments. Each installment is managed in a friendly way with reminders for all parties, and handling of missed payments.
- Pay in advance: Client makes a payment of type "advanced" to a clerk account. Later when the clerk creates a charge, LegalAtoms check if there's a credit balance for the client or their lawyer, prompts for confirmation and automatically applies the credit balance
- Lawyer can pay: A lawyer or party designated by the clerk can make payments on behalf of the client
LegalAtoms allows for external to parties and departments involved
- Ability to add rules to update payment plan status for a given case in response to certain actions on that case e.g. case is dismissed
- LegalAtoms additionally sends verification email to all provided email addresses and wait for verification before sending anything else to that email address.
LegalAtoms offers complete managing of bail bonds
- Track the amount of surety bonds
- Track the status of bail bonding companies
- Automatically update bail with case incidents e.g.
- Forfeiture
- Cancellation
- Discharge
- Reinstatement
- Close out a previous bond when a second bond has been initiated on the same case (i.e. Disposed/No Forfeiture)
- Manage a bond
- Record a bond including personal bond
- Assess fees
- Reject
- Modify
- Cash payments, receipts and tallies
- Limit cash features to certain users
- Track deposits to a central entity
- Setup credit card terminals
LegalAtoms offers Trust accounts for your clients
An account in trust or trust account refers to any type of financial account that is opened by an individual and managed by a designated trustee for the benefit of a third party per agreed-upon terms.
LegalAtoms has built in smart technology e.g.
- Autodetect and trigger alerts when a minor on the trust account becomes an adult
- Ability to filter accounts by this field values
A clerk, financial bookkeeper or any member of the court staff with proper permissions setup will have ability to generate reports for viewing, printing and sharing.
Examples of reports: View cases with
- Credit balance
- Payments overdue and the amounts
Convenience features include
- Ability to filter, sort and group by virtually any field on the case e.g. payment type is a bond
- Generate notices in bulk for the selected cases
LegalAtoms offers complete handling of collections scenarios
- Refer payment accounts to collections via automated rules or via case by case
- Track payments made via collections
LegalAtoms provides multiple roles to allow for efficient operation of different teams within a court, while still keeping maximum confidentiality.
Different users can also access the case without viewing all aspects of the case.
Legalatoms allows clerks to setup standard credits which can be triggered by certain financial calculations. Alternatively clerks can provide ad hoc credits
- Waivers: Setup automated criteria for In Forma Pauperis (IFP) waiver. Allow self-represented litigants to submit filing and IFP waiver without paying fee upfront. Routing IFP waiver to correct judicial officer for approval or rejection of waiver
- Credits: Issues credits based on community service, time served in prison or based on other factors
- Refunds: For refunds assign disbursement priority: This basically means which refunds are processed first. Court staff members can override priority of disbursements
LegalAtoms offers some basic accounting and ability to export data so you can connect it with your primary accounting software
- Ability to track daily transactions with payment details
- Automatically routes all submitted documents in the file to the correct queue for verification and acceptance
- LegalAtoms provides convenient data import and export features using open secure formats such as OFX, and CSV