How does evergreen retainer replenishment work in LeanLaw?

An evergreen retainer holds a set floor balance in trust; replenishment means topping it back up once it drops below that floor, instead of letting it run to zero before rebilling. Your firm sets the floor and top-up amount, not a vendor.

Why a floor instead of a running balance

Most retainers get drawn down as work happens until nothing is left, at which point the client gets a new invoice or a request to fund the account from scratch. An evergreen retainer skips that gap by setting a floor: once trust funds for that client cross under it, the firm asks the client to bring the balance back to its starting point before the account runs dry mid-matter. The mechanism only works if the trust ledger for that client is accurate day to day, because the floor is meaningless if nobody notices when it’s been crossed.

Evergreen structures show up most often in matters where work is ongoing and unpredictable in pace — a litigation matter with no fixed end date, or an advisory relationship billed hourly over months rather than for a single transaction. A flat retainer that simply gets drawn to zero works fine for a short, bounded engagement; it works poorly for a relationship the firm expects to bill against for a year or more, because it forces a rebilling conversation with the client every time the account empties. Setting a floor turns that recurring conversation into a smaller, more predictable one — smaller in scope, not necessarily smaller in frequency, since a floor set too close to the starting balance can trigger top-up requests just as often as no floor at all would.

A hypothetical example

Take a hypothetical retainer of $50,000 with a floor set at $25,000. As billed work draws the balance down, the firm needs to notice the moment it dips below $25,000 — not at month-end reconciliation, but close to when it happens — and then ask the client to bring it back to $50,000. Those figures are illustrative only; firms set their own floor and top-up amounts based on matter size, expected pace of work, and what a client will tolerate funding in one request. A floor set at half the starting balance, as in this example, gives the firm roughly one draw-down cycle of warning before the account would otherwise hit zero; a floor set closer to zero gives less warning but ties up less of the client’s money at any one time. Neither choice is correct in the abstract — it’s a trade-off the firm and client work out at engagement, not a default a piece of software should assume for them.

What replenishing a retainer actually is

A request to refill an evergreen retainer works differently from applying trust funds to an invoice, and the difference matters for trust compliance, not just bookkeeping tidiness. An invoice bills for fees the firm has already earned and can move out of trust into operating. A replenishment request asks the client to add funds that are not yet earned and remain client property in trust until they are. Treating a top-up as though it were an invoice risks describing unearned funds as billed revenue, and that habit is what turns a minor bookkeeping shortcut into a trust accounting problem.

The rules governing how evergreen retainers must be disclosed, documented, and handled are set by your jurisdiction’s bar, and they apply to your firm regardless of which software you use to track the balance. No product, including LeanLaw, certifies that your evergreen retainer practice satisfies your bar’s trust accounting rules. LeanLaw records trust deposits and disbursements against the ledger; your firm remains responsible for the underlying rule and how it’s applied to each client.

What good recordkeeping requires either way

Whatever the floor and whatever the top-up amount, an evergreen retainer only holds up under scrutiny if the underlying trust records do three things reliably: track each client’s balance separately from every other client’s, timestamp every deposit and disbursement against that specific balance, and reconcile the sum of every client sub-ledger to the actual bank balance of the trust account on a recurring basis. That third piece — three-way reconciliation between the bank, the trust ledger, and each client’s sub-ledger — is the mechanism a bar audit actually tests, evergreen retainer or not. A threshold-and-top-up rule is a policy layered on top of that reconciliation discipline; it doesn’t substitute for it, and a firm that gets the reconciliation right but skips the floor is in better shape than one that has an elaborate replenishment rule sitting on top of records nobody’s actually balancing.

What this depends on

• What your jurisdiction’s bar requires for retainer disclosure, client notice, and documentation
• How your firm sets the floor and top-up amount per client or matter
• Who’s actually watching the trust ledger day to day
• How your chart of accounts separates each client’s trust sub-ledger

Once the floor and the disclosure language are settled, the operating question becomes how quickly your firm notices a balance has crossed the line, because that’s the gap an evergreen retainer is meant to close.

Related questions

When a retainer balance drops below a set level and must be topped back up to its starting amount, is there a way to mirror those replenishment-threshold rules? Trust accounting can track a client’s balance against whatever floor your firm sets; the threshold itself is a policy your engagement agreement defines, not a fixed rule a system enforces on its own.

So instead of doing an invoice for it, do we just send a request to refill the trust account? Conceptually, yes: a replenishment request refills unearned trust funds, while an invoice bills fees already earned, and keeping the two distinct protects the trust segregation rules your bar sets.