Hi, I'm Yuji Hiraizumi.
I'm a legal bookkeeping specialist and the owner of Legal Bookkeepers Australia. My team and I look after the books of small law firms around the country — trust accounts, office accounts, BAS and payroll.
I previously held an external examiner licence with the Law Society of NSW, though my work has always been on the bookkeeping side rather than examining. It gave me a clear picture of what an examiner checks, and that's shaped how I keep records ever since.
From engineering in Japan to trust accounts in Australia.
My first career was civil engineering in Japan, where service standards are exacting and small errors are expected to be caught early. Checking your own work was simply part of the work, and that habit has been more useful in trust accounting than anything else I brought with me.
I moved to Australia in 2003 and completed a Master's in Accounting. In the years that followed I did financial analysis for businesses of every size, and worked alongside tax agents, CFOs, auditors and external examiners.
Along the way I sat for and held an external examiner licence with the Law Society of NSW. I no longer hold it, and my work has always been keeping the books themselves. But earning it meant learning the trust-account requirements from the regulator's side: what gets checked, and what's treated as a breach rather than an oversight.
In the years since, working with law firms, the same handful of problems keep coming up. A reconciliation left undone. A transfer recorded loosely. A ledger nobody has looked at since the last examination. None of those firms set out to breach anything — they simply had a bookkeeper who understood accounting, but not legal accounting.
That's why I stick to legal bookkeeping and don't take on general small-business work. It's a narrow field, and it takes attention to stay current in it.
What you can expect from me.
Records kept with the examination in mind
The issues examiners raise tend to be the same ones each time, so I set your ledgers up to avoid them rather than fix them later.
Documentation ready when it's asked for
Reconciliations and supporting records kept in the form and order an examiner expects, so examination time is a straightforward handover.
Monthly, not annually
Trust issues are simple to correct in the month they happen and difficult to unpick a year later, so the monthly reconciliation is where the real work sits.
Plain answers
A straight explanation of where your practice stands, without the accounting jargon — and I'm happy to be asked the same question more than once.
Happy to have a first chat.
New clients get a free initial consultation. We'll go through how your practice runs today, what shape the trust and office ledgers are in, and whether I'm the right person to help — I'll say so if I'm not.
If we go ahead, you'll be dealing with me and my team directly.
Let's get your trust account in order.
Book a no-obligation discovery call. I'll tell you honestly where your books stand and how I'd help.
Book a discovery call