In the fall of 2021, I was exploring my next play. I was reconnecting with colleagues in tech and venture capital, as well as former classmates from undergrad and law school. Worlds collided when a friend showed me the spreadsheet he was using to manage 400 personal injury and workers' comp cases. The challenge was clear but the path was messy.
The challenge
How could we build a better piece of software for lawyers? One that was easy to use and actually solved the most significant challenges for attorneys managing their firms: getting new cases, making more money from their existing cases, and keeping their clients happy?
The approach
We began assembling a team. This included a few full-time software engineers with experience building microservices that we knew would be needed to power any application, as well as front-end developers skilled in designing user interfaces. A key part of our team was also a network of industry insiders who could provide us with knowledge, context, and credibility.
Within the first month, we built a network of nearly 50 legal professionals from across the country. The vast majority were firm owners building and running their own personal injury law firm, much like my friend. We also brought on a number of legal support staff and legal practice management consultants as design partners. Our most senior advisors were a handful of attorneys at the top of the industry who had built nationally known law firms and reputations.
With our design partners and advisors, we dove deep into the details and mechanics of their practices and firm operations. We spent thousands of hours meeting with law firm owners, attorneys, and support staff. Through our conversations, we formed several hypotheses and a product roadmap to tackle the most significant challenges facing personal injury firm owners:
It's expensive to pay to acquire new clients and cases. Traditional advertising, lead generation companies and Google Pay-Per-Click costs are very high e.g., $400+ per click on keywords such as 'accident attorney' in competitive markets like Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and Atlanta.
Cases frequently get stuck at common bottlenecks and chokepoints in their life. Common and repetitive tasks such as document generation, reconciling side spreadsheets, and keeping notes up-to-date take up considerable staff time, take staff away from client service, and cost firms real money, e.g., $12,500 a year in wasted time per legal support staff.
Improving case cycle time for contingency fee lawyers is everything. Reducing time on desk among active cases is much more profitable than just acquiring new clients and cases. When a firm can reduce their time on desk by 20% they can boost revenue by 25%.
Client satisfaction comes down to the frequency of contact and client communication. We conducted our own survey of more than 3,000 personal injury clients and found that frequency of communication and responsiveness of attorney and staff was the #1 driver of client satisfaction (Net Promoter Score). Case outcome was #2.
The result
We built a modern operating system for personal injury. Our feature set is squarely focused on helping alleviate the most pressing pain points we identified:
Cost-effective case acquisition - Gladiate Campaigns enable attorneys and their staff to quickly and effortlessly launch communication and marketing campaigns via text and even custom handwritten cards without integrating anything or leaving the Gladiate application. Client birthday wishes, holiday cards, and thank you letters can be scheduled and sent via text and handwritten mail, making it easier and cheaper for attorneys to keep their firm top of mind and earn more referrals from their network and past clients.
Efficient case management - We created a patent-pending 1 Click Client Signup process, unique case visualizations for running treatment and negotiation reviews more efficiently and visually spotting case bottlenecks and, embedded key point solutions to help capture client information, sentiment, and satisfaction and even automate patient-directed medical record requests and followups all to help firms reduce manual tasks and cut the average number of days on desk for their cases.
Seamless client communication - Gladiate's native SMS and MMS text functionality makes it fast and efficient for attorneys and staff to maintain a single record of all client contact and effortlessly send and receive text messages, photos, videos, and files between their case and their clients as ad-hoc messages as well as scheduled messages triggered on key case milestones.
We've wrapped all of these features and more in an intuitive, responsive web application that enables attorneys and staff to capture key case and client info, generate documents, leave notes, create tasks, and manage their firms from their phones.
