[Century City & Beverly Hills, Los Angeles County]
Software for Century City
Century City had the tightest office market in Los Angeles through 2025, roughly 8 percent vacancy at the region’s highest asking rents, while Downtown sat close to 40 percent availability. Law firms had taken more than 500,000 square feet there by 2023 and the leasing has continued, with one Big Four firm signing for around 150,000 square feet in 2026. Beverly Hills next door collects more from business taxes than from sales taxes. This is a professional services economy, and what almost every business in it has in common is that it holds other people’s money under a regulator’s clock.
[The businesses here]
Who I work with in Century City
These firms are not short of money and are frequently short of anyone who can change a system. They also run on compliance obligations with fixed annual dates, which turns out to be the most reliable place to find work worth automating.
Law firms and branch offices
Matter intake is gated by a conflicts check, then an engagement letter, then a retainer into a client trust account. Time is entered daily, prebills are reviewed monthly by the responsible partner, and e-billing goes out under each client’s outside counsel guidelines, which differ.
Talent and representation agencies
Roster management, submissions, offers and deal memos. A licensed agency collects employer payments into a trust account and remits to the artist net of commission, under a statutory deadline.
Wealth managers and registered investment advisers
Onboarding paperwork, custodial account opening, quarterly performance reporting and billing calculated off account values, which means billing depends on a reconciliation rather than an invoice.
Real estate owners, developers and investment managers
Acquisition pipelines and underwriting models, closing checklists, lender and investor reporting packs, capital calls and distributions, lease abstraction and construction draw approvals, mostly in spreadsheets and email.
Business management firms
Paying bills on behalf of clients, running payroll for household staff and loan-out entities, splitting commissions between agents, managers and lawyers, and reconciling royalties. Many small entities, each needing its own clean set of books.
[What slows them down]
The usual bottlenecks
- 01
Four separate annual trust account obligations, one deadline
Every active California lawyer must annually report whether they were responsible for client funds, register IOLTA and non-IOLTA accounts with the State Bar, complete a self-assessment of trust account practices, and certify understanding of the safekeeping rules. The State Bar has set the reporting deadline at 30 March 2026. Unresolved non-compliance leads to involuntary inactive enrolment.
What it costs: A four-part annual filing tracked per lawyer, currently managed by somebody chasing a spreadsheet.
- 02
A 30-day statutory clock on artist money
A licensed talent agency receiving funds on an artist’s behalf must immediately deposit them into a trust account, and the funds less commission must be disbursed to the artist within 30 days of receipt. Separately, fee schedules must be filed with the Labor Commissioner and no change takes effect until seven days after filing.
What it costs: A per-payment deadline, tracked by hand, where the consequence of missing it is regulatory rather than commercial.
- 03
Billing that depends on reconstructing a number
An adviser’s fee is calculated off assets under management, so the invoice cannot be produced until custodial positions and valuations agree with the firm’s own records at period end. The annual Form ADV updating amendment is then due within 90 days of fiscal year end, and client funds must be verified by an independent accountant at a time the accountant chooses without notice.
What it costs: Billing blocked behind a reconciliation, and a surprise examination that can arrive at any time.
- 04
Conflicts checks that depend on someone remembering
A conflicts check is only as good as the record of every party, matter and adverse party the firm has ever touched. When that record is spread across a practice management system, an old database and the memory of a partner who has been there twenty years, intake slows down and the check is weaker than anyone admits.
What it costs: Slow intake on new matters, and a risk nobody can quantify.
[What a fix looks like]
An agency that stops tracking disbursements in a spreadsheet
Illustrative example, not a past client
Take a mid-sized representation agency in Century City. Thirty agents, several hundred active clients, payments arriving from studios, brands and production companies on wildly different terms.
Before: payments land in the trust account and are logged in a spreadsheet by the business affairs team. Commission is calculated per deal, sometimes with splits across two agents and occasionally a third party. Disbursement to the artist happens when someone gets to it, which is usually well inside the 30-day window but is not tracked as a deadline anywhere. Reconciling the trust account against the ledger is a monthly exercise that runs long, because a payment often arrives without enough information to match it to a deal.
After: incoming payments are matched to the deal record on arrival, with anything unmatched going into a short queue rather than sitting in a suspense line. Commission and splits are calculated by rule from the deal terms rather than recomputed each time. Each receipt starts a visible clock against its disbursement deadline, so the exposure is a dashboard rather than a hope. The trust reconciliation runs continuously and flags a break the day it appears.
The business affairs team stops doing arithmetic and starts handling the exceptions, which is the only part that ever needed a person.
[Where to start]
Services that fit Century City
Internal tools & dashboards
Trust ledgers, disbursement clocks and conflicts records are exactly the kind of thing firms run in spreadsheets because no vendor product fits their structure.
Learn more →0043–6 weeksProcess automation
Matching incoming payments to deals or matters, and calculating splits, are rule-based jobs currently done by expensive people with a calculator.
Learn more →0053–8 weeksSystem integrations
The practice management system, the accounting system and the custodian or payer all hold part of the record. Making them agree is what turns month end from an event into a background process.
Learn more →Every project runs the same way, from first call to handover: how it works.
[Related]
Go deeper
[Century City questions]
Questions
Can software handle client trust accounting safely?
It can track it, reconcile it continuously and flag a break the day it appears, which is a real improvement on a monthly spreadsheet. What it must never do is move money on its own or let a ledger be edited without a record of who changed what. Those two constraints shape the whole design, and the compliance judgement stays with your firm and its counsel.
Our practice management system is fixed. Can you work around it?
Usually, yes. Most have an API or at least a scheduled export, and in professional services the answer is almost always to leave the system of record alone and build the missing layer beside it. Replacing a practice management system is a project I would generally talk you out of.
We handle confidential client matters. How do you work with that?
With as little access as possible. Wherever a project can be built against anonymised or synthetic data, it is, and I am comfortable signing your confidentiality terms rather than offering mine. Where production access is genuinely needed, it is scoped, logged and time-limited, and I would expect your risk team to review that before anything starts.
Do you build anything that gives legal or financial advice?
No. Software here should surface a deadline, a discrepancy or a missing document to a qualified person. Anything that implies a regulatory judgement has been made by a system is a liability dressed up as a feature.
Do you come on-site in Century City or Beverly Hills?
Yes, and for confidentiality reasons it is often easier for everyone than remote access. Much of this work can be scoped in a couple of meetings with the people who actually run intake and billing.
[Nearby]
Sources for the figures on this page
- CommercialCafe Los Angeles office market trends: Century City and Beverly Hills vacancy and asking rents, calendar 2025
- Commercial Observer (July 2026): Century City asking rents and the PwC Century City lease
- Los Angeles Business Journal (September 2023): law firm leasing concentration in Century City
- Beverly Press (June 2026): Beverly Hills FY2026-27 budget and general fund revenue mix
- State Bar of California, Client Trust Account Protection Program: annual requirements and deadline
- California Rules of Court, rule 9.8.5: annual client trust account requirements
- California Labor Code 1700.25: talent agency trust deposit and 30-day disbursement requirement
- 17 CFR 275.204-1: Form ADV annual updating amendment within 90 days
- 17 CFR 275.206(4)-2: custody rule, quarterly custodial statements and the annual surprise examination
Based nearby. Let’s talk.
Evenbuilt is in Los Angeles, on-site across Los Angeles and Orange County, Inland Empire by appointment, remote everywhere else.
● Booking projects for Q4 2026