← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
461. The Tech Stack That Was Costing TORKLAW Cases—And the AI-Native OS Built to Replace It | Jim Andresen, TORKLAW & LawWorks
00:21:21
Jim Andresen, COO of TorkLaw and CEO of LawWorks, explains how he replaced a fragmented Zapier-spaghetti stack with an AI-native operating system built to run a PI firm end to end.
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- [00:01]
A
You became a lawyer to win cases, not to stress over your marketing. If you're looking for the absolute best partner to help you increase your leads, then you need rankings in your corner. This isn't just marketing hype. We come with receipts. Clutch is the gold standard for B2B ratings. Evaluating agencies based entirely on verified feedback from law firms. Just like yours. We just found out the rankings took home six, count them, six Klutch Global awards for SEO and advertising. That's proof over promises. So proud of my team. Let rankings bring the high quality leads so you can focus on the work that matters. Visit Rankings IO Clutch to see what an award winning team can do for you. That's Rankings IO Clutch. As your firm scales, so does your software stack. An intake system here, a case management tool there, and before you know it, nothing talks to each other.
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B
And so you have to make adaptations and you end up with zapier spaghetti and you end up with spreadsheets all over the place to fill in gaps. And you have copy and paste errors and sync issues.
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A
That disconnected mess is costing you time, money and cases. Today, Jim Andreessen, COO of Torque Law and founder of Lawworks, is showing us how he tore down those tech silos and built a unified AI native operating system from the ground up. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Let's get into it, I guess this big picture, you know, what is Lawworks? Give me like the through line what it is and then we'll, we'll kind of jump in from there.
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B
At its SimpleTest, it's an AI native rating system designed specifically for law firms like ours. And it's just that it's a web based system. It's not a generic salesforce. We don't have licensing issues and limitations that are put on us by some of these other add on type of systems. And so we get to imagine it from the ground up. And so we did that. We built it specifically as you said, I wear a couple of hats. And we built it specifically for Tor Claw. And we know that there's a lot of firms that operate similarly to us or would like to. So we are going to open that up to the wider world and make it available to anybody that wants to use it. We want it to be a flexible thing, but you know, we have some, some pieces in place to, to help you stay focused and not get lost in all the opportunities and options that are available.
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A
So you know, you've said your biggest breakthrough wasn't fixing just one department. It was recognizing the real problem, the gaps between. You know, walk me through that. What was the exact moment or metric that made you realize the connective tissue, the connecting your systems was broken?
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B
So I've been doing this for 13, 14 years, something like that. And over time, you begin to accumulate different products, different tools to achieve a result. And so if you, you know, your firm, my firm, you know, you're going to have an intake system, you're going to have a case management system, a phone system, you're going to have a messaging system, you're going to have marketing channels that are all scattered all over the place. And so which, the result of that is that you sometimes have disparate systems that, that don't connect at all. And you find that some vendors, some systems lock you in and you, they don't share out. And so your data is siloed into their system. And so what you end up with is your people have to become the connective tissue and they have to do the work and they have to copy and paste and they have to migrate files over and bring it back. And, and then you, you find out that the data types don't match and that the, the systems, the way it's constructed doesn't work with another system. And so you have to make adaptations and you end up with zapier spaghetti and you end up with spreadsheets all over the place to fill in gaps and you have copy and paste errors and sync issues. And it's something that has been present and. But it reached a boiling point probably three years ago and we couldn't get our data out of our case management system in a way that we could report on what was coming from our intake system. And we were having a hard time navigating and we had people working just on building reports to be able to tell us where the problems were. And by the time that the report was ready, it was now a month out of date. And so we thought, there's going to be a better way. And we went looking and we explored a few options and we ended up getting to a place where we needed to solve, solve it ourselves. And so we hired some very smart people and we started building. What is lawworks today?
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A
Yeah, let me dig into that. You know, so there's the lead docket domo, you know, lead docket file vine domo kind of combo. It's pretty common, you know, not, you know, then the ring centrals and Amazon connects and then you Got the Salesforce a little bit more open. Maybe they're doing the Amazon connect, different phone systems there. A little bit freer use on the API and the ability to plug into things. What was the tech stack that you were kind of frankensteining together and what were some of those limitations that you ran into?
- [05:05]
B
Sure. So I'm not one to bash anybody. We are still on lead docket. We haven't migrated away from that. We have been a case peer shop and again I think that they built one of the more intuitive systems and I think it had a lot of, a lot of strengths and it's an easy, easy one to get started with. But we did find that we had a hard time getting our data out and still do. We're a go to connect phone system. We've had built dialers direct with Twilio and we built autoresponders and we've tried a handful of AI voice systems to handle different things and it's a challenge. They've all got their strengths, but there's certainly some trade offs with each choice you make.
- [05:45]
A
Once you realize that Frankenstack is holding your firm back, the question becomes how do you actually fix it? Jim realized that he didn't just need another app, he needed a single end to end operating system that could track a case from the first ring all the way to the settlement. By bringing the entire life cycle under one roof, Jim took back total ownership of his firm's data and finally eliminated that dreaded vendor lock in. So are we talking like full life cycle? Are we talking phone rings, the operating system has you know, AI capabilities or it's like, you know, CRM and project management. Like, like talk to me about operating system. Is it full life cycle in, Is it, you know, including intake?
- [06:26]
B
Yeah. So yeah, I mean that's, that's a great question. And, and it's, the answer is what it is and, and what it's becoming. But today as it stands, we handle pre litigation litigation from end to end and we're able to do document generation, AI enabled document. So you know, think even up think Eve. And right now the team is building out the intake side of things so by the time that it's in the hands of everybody, the intake piece should be done. So the, the hope is, the, the belief is is that from the first phone call all the way until settlement, we're going to be able to handle things end to end. One of the cool things that, you know, one of the things that I think is great about what we're building is we don't want others to have the experience that we had where you are locked into a vendor. We want you to be able to come free will go if you want to, and that your data is your data. If you prefer the product that even up or eve or pick your, you know, document generation company or whatever, we want you to be able to easily push it there, bring it right back in. And you know, if that's for that piece, that functionality, if that's the solution that you prefer, it's your data, it's your cases, you do what you want with it. And so we are really about providing the Rails all the way across the life of the case. And we probably won't dabble into project management, but one of the things that we are doing is we built and are building out as a developer portal and so that third parties with their tooling and opportunities can build on top of our system in a fashion that is similar to like a salesforce, where you can build within the ecosystem and have your product offering available on the, on the platform, but all the underlying infrastructures in place. And so it's going to be pretty versatile.
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A
The data is becoming more important than ever because now, you know, whether you're using Snowflake or Bigquery or what have you, it's now being formed as a basis for all the AI intelligence and decision making. You know, now we're like, I never thought in a million years that like a company like ours would be talking a Snowflake, right? Or, but here we are, right? It's a component of like data housing. And so where do you see, you know, the usage of data, make an impact and like, and just the importance of controlling that, you know, that and having, you know, control of that data.
- [08:51]
B
Where AI is at, particularly right now is context, is, is the thing that, that is shaping the quality of the output that you, you receive. And so when I think about data lakes, data warehouses, it's great to store it, it's great to be able to retrieve it, but you need to be able to pass it to something that can do something with it. And so for us, we, we want to have full control of it on our system so that, you know, we can pass that to the models that are going to be making, manipulating, reading, learning off of it and writing from it. And so we are, our intention is to, you know, we have a structured data system. We have the ability to ocr, pull like structured data out of unstructured documents, place that into your, you know, your record of truth and source of truth and, and then be able to generate documents out of that. And so that's something that we don't have now. When I say now in recent, recent our data torque laws data has lived on box which is, it's a universal file management system. Our cases lived in case peer. I could, had a hard time getting our structured data out of case peer, our, our unstructured data from box and then pushing it to, you know, one of these demand generators or you know, medical summarizers or whatever we want, you know, whatever the function is that we're looking for. And so it's a manual thing where we're pushing it and we're pulling it back and it takes time and we people are that connection and we make mistakes. And the end tool that's doing the work is lacking some of the broader context because it's missing pieces of that. And so we want to be able to control all that, be able to pass that cleanly to a model that's going to be doing that work. One of the things that we, the way we're building lawworks is that other firms that will be able to be on the platform will benefit from the wider ecosystem. So we'll still, you know, be passing your data as your data and it doesn't get shared with other firms but, but we'll be able to benchmark and see how you are comparing compared to other firms or there might be elements where we can share insights where provider X or provider Y on average reduces their bills by this month much and this is favorable in these situations and be able to say, you know, just how are you tracking compared to others and identify opportunities, identify bottlenecks and that are common where you're an outlier, identify where you're an outlier compared to what's common. And so I think that the collective intelligence is an interesting opportunity that doesn't exist, at least not for us and the platform that we've come from. And so I think that that's an interesting thing there.
- [11:32]
A
Yeah, I see all just amazing benefits and just massive unlocks for the future having control of that. And you know, there's going to be more and more capabilities that arise every day. Just the pace at, at which new developments are occurring is just exponential.
- [11:48]
B
Yeah, it's unbelievable. I mean just, you know, I'm, I sit on X, you know, Twitter, whatever we call it these days and every day there is just a breakthrough, a new, a new product, a new opportunity that just unbelievable the, the pace of innovation. And yeah, it's it's crazy. And so to be able to connect all those pieces together is really what we're hoping to do and I think really going to unlock some opportunity for firms, firm owners and, and the future of law.
- [12:29]
A
Once your operations and tech stack are actually talking to each other, you finally have the infrastructure to scale. And Jim knows a thing or two about scaling. As the COO of Torque Law, he has helped lead the firm's expansion into multiple highly competitive markets across the country. I wanted to pick his brain on how they go toe to toe with the legacy billboard guys, why precision marketing is their weapon of choice and how they assemble the right teams to execute that vision. I kind of wanted to switch over to Torque Law. I mean you've been COO your background working with another big PI firm in the past. So you've had different go to market strategies in order to acquire leads and you know, torque Law multi state in some big markets. So you know, how do you think about moving into other markets? How do you think about a go to market strategy and trying to break into these markets that have had people doing broadcast television and the billboards for years. Like how do you think about trying to go into these, into some of these markets?
- [13:26]
B
I think you got two different games that, that get played, right? You got the, you got the billboard guys and they are known by name. And sometimes that's a positive and sometimes that's a negative. I've always thought that the more targeted approach, paid search, organic search, word of mouth, you know, reputation type referrals has always been the, you know, it's the precision approach. And it, it may be higher cost per, you know, touch point, but the acquisition price, as long as you can make the numbers work, it usually has benefited us. And so in terms of going to market, you know, we, we at least in the early days it was really like can we find a licensed attorney to work here and can we acquire a license? And so we would get somebody in the firm either by acquisition or by just go going through the process would get a license and pick your state and we can function, we can operate, we could do whatever the minimum thing was, we had to set up an office there or a physical location and we would target and be precision with our marketing, see what worked there. It's interesting to see how tactics that you deploy in one market work or don't work in another and where the opportunities lie. And sometimes you think, boy, that's working great in Illinois. I'm gonna bring that to California. And it just falls flat. And vice versa. And you get personality differences and what's compelling to the client and what they're looking for. And so you find the language that speaks to them. And so you know, I mean you run a very successful marketing firm and you gotta kind of find all the pieces that line up and when you find that the targeting with the messaging and it connects and your intake team is hitting on point and in terms of matching the messaging, it returns well for you and then obviously you got have your team actually deliver the results in the end. But we're simple people and we don't overcomplicate it in terms of making something work. And one of the things that Reza and his brother Karosh own torque law, they're not afraid to try things. And so we've always been a firm that we'll try things and be okay to fail and try the next thing. And when something works, we will write it until it doesn't work and add to the stable of things that work. And as things drop off, they drop off. Maybe we'll revisit them, maybe we won't. That's great.
- [15:43]
A
Love that mindset. And I think you gotta, you know, do the bullets before bombs and do the testing and find out what works. And you're right because some, you know, you take Google Ads, Google search and it's auction based. So if, if one market's lighter than another and you know, it could throw off your CAC and well it could be anything, it could be broadcast television, radio, whatever, depending upon what's saturated, what's not saturated and your competitors messaging, like what resonates like what you said. So that makes sense to me for sure. You know, what other in regards to, you know, working an organization of the size that you've worked at. What other common bottlenecks you see is, is it hiring? Is it, is it talent? Talent's always an issue. You know you want to get the A players but there's different levels like finding the, the pre lit attorney or the litigation attorney. Talk to me about some of the other common bottlenecks that you see.
- [16:40]
B
The bottleneck moves. I think that's the biggest thing is you know, you, you, you, you solve in one spot and you actually, you just create a bottleneck somewhere else. And so you know that my brain is limited to kind of the idea of a pipeline and you got, you know, just, just the visual of where the thing pinches and, and where it bloats and, and I, I don't know that there's any like a magic Bullet to solve any of these problems. What I do think you remember the movie the Moneyball that came out. Oh yeah, 20 years ago, something like that.
- [17:09]
A
Billy Bean.
- [17:10]
B
Yeah. The idea is that you go out and you acquire value and so you know we, I love the idea of a players and they're great and they're fantastic and but you know you can get, you can get some high value people that maybe they don't have the right experience level but they're intelligent and problem solvers and maybe you got somebody who's got experience but can't get, you know, can't get a thing across the line. You know, they can't just, just can't get that final piece of execution. And so you find the people that, that can complement each other and the high value and the things that you can coach and you bring those people in and that talent and you know, it's easy to say and it's harder to actually achieve but we don't just go for a players. I mean that's the dream. I'd love to find the A plus people across the board but sometimes you can find the new guy, the fresh out of college, the excited about everything, the executor guy that is willing to be a little scrappy and just get it done and you construct a team and sometimes it's a little, little, little rough around some edges and they get things done. And so I, you know, I, I, I love the puzzle of it, I hate the process of it. But constructing a team, it's a fun thing to do.
- [18:18]
A
Well Jim, this is if our audience has any questions for you and wants to connect, wants to learn more about LawWorks. What's the best way to get in touch?
- [18:25]
B
Email is probably the best. Jim Torque Law if you want to talk about, I don't know, all things operations in a law firm. Jimorklaw.com Jim@LawWorks.com if you want to talk about your, the operating system or being a part of our customer base and, and yeah, it'd be awesome to connect with people on either of those fronts.
- [18:43]
A
Amazing. Jim, thanks for coming on the show.
- [18:46]
B
Thank you Chris, appreciate it.
- [18:50]
A
A massive thank you to Jim Andreessen for sharing his brilliant strategies with us today. When you finally get your tech stack talking, your team can stop doing the manual data entry and get back to what actually winning cases and driving revenue. Taking control of your data and adopting a Moneyball mindset to build your team aren't just operational upgrades. They are the foundation for serious growth. At Rankings we believe your marketing should be just as precise and data driven as your firm's operations. If you want to partner with an agency where excellence is the standard and proof beats promises, head on over to Rankings IO. I'm Chris Dreyer, and we'll see you next time on Personal Injury Mastermind.