Accounting for Attorneys
Explore legal accounting essentials: compliance, financial management, tech tools, taxation, and strategic insights for attorneys' financial success.
W-9s, 1099s, and the “Please Don’t Make This a January Fire Drill” Problem
If your law firm has ever hit January and suddenly realized you’re missing vendor tax info, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common (and most avoidable) compliance scrambles we see: the frantic hunt for W-9s, the question of who gets a 1099, and the creeping fear that “we’ve never been caught before” might not be a strategy you want to test.
At The Proper Trust, LLC, we work with law firms who want their books clean, their workflows consistent, and their compliance handled proactively—not as a last-minute miracle.
Let’s talk about what matters most: why W-9s matter, what happens when you don’t have them, and how to build a simple process that protects your firm.
What a W-9 actually does (in plain English)
A W-9 is how you collect a payee’s tax identity: their legal name and taxpayer identification number (TIN). That’s it. But this simple form carries a big purpose:
It protects your firm from being required to withhold a portion of payments to that vendor.
In the conversatio...
