“Postrio is a customization we’ve built on top of Litify and Salesforce that enables us to take documents that are in Docrio and send them through the mail. It increases productivity in your firm by making mail a breeze,” Josh Kwartler, Chief Operating Officer, Kwartler Manus

Kwartler Manus is a 29-person personal injury law firm operating out of Philadelphia and southern New Jersey. The firm implemented Litify a few years ago and is now reaping the benefits of automation in their day-to-day workflows. Kwartler Manus also built their own app on top of the Litify platform that enables them to send documents through the mail at the click of a button, making registered and certified mailings a breeze. We had the pleasure of speaking with Josh Kwartler, Chief Operating Officer to learn more.

Making the change to Litify

Q: Prior to implementing Litify, what were some of the challenges the firm was facing?
A: When I joined the firm, I was the ninth employee. I was actually hired alongside our implementation of Litify. The partners realized early on in the process that due to the robust nature of the platform, we needed somebody in-house focused on helping us take full advantage of everything. They had been using MyCase, but there wasn’t enough ability for that platform to scale. We could manage the cases, but it was becoming difficult to manage the people and manage what people were doing in those cases.

Q: How is the team adjusting to using Litify, and moving all their processes into the cloud?
A: Implementing Litify has been interesting for us because we have a mix of people on the team who are at different stages of their own technology journeys. We have some people who came to us already familiar with Salesforce and we have others who have never used a CRM software before. But overall, all our users are enjoying the change and getting onboard with it.

With Litify, we’re able to bring everything into one screen for everyone — no more logging into one program for this and using another one for that. Now when attorneys are looking at a matter, they can see everything they need to know in one place. Even our long-time paralegal who has been doing service slips by hand for years now appreciates the fact she can instantly look up dates, automatically generate documents, and now with Postrio, she also doesn’t even have to go to the mail machine.

Life with Litify

Q: What does the team now enjoy most about Litify?
A: Personally, what I love the most is that the platform is built on Salesforce, which gives me total flexibility to do anything I need. We run some competitions between our attorneys to see who can get the most Google reviews combined with the highest settlements and the most complaints filed — we call it the triple crown. And we have access to all these metrics now with Litify.

If you look across the firm, say at an intake agent, we can see how many calls are outbound, how many calls are inbound, the number of intakes they handle in a day, and the number of text messages or emails they send. Then we can take all that information a step further: Are they converting those calls into cases? As a firm, how are closing those cases? How long is it taking? What is the rate of referrals going out? Are we just tossing people over or are we really handing them over with the white glove experience we’re looking for? There’s a real depth of insights across the platform.

Q: How is the team using Docrio?
A: We finally made the switch to Docrio, Litify’s integrated document management and creation platform. We were able to have one person come into the office and digitize on demand. And that increased our ability to transition and scale to a national law firm that has an intake team working from the West coast to cover the later hours. Docrio’s given us that additional flexibility and collaboration. One of our partners always says, “if it’s not in Litify, it doesn’t exist,” — which is coming from someone who needed to have a paper file just a few years ago.

Q: Can you tell us about the Postrio feature you’ve built?
A: Postrio is a customization we’ve built on top of Litify and Salesforce that enables us to take documents that are in Docrio and send them through the mail. It increases productivity in your firm by making mail a breeze. Just upload or generate your document in Docrio, select your recipients and mail class, and send. Postrio will have your document printed at a facility near your recipient and placed in the mail automatically. This has been a huge timesaver for us, especially thinking about the fact that lawyers have certified mail and registered mail where we needed to go into the post office, and now, we just do it with the click of a button.

And again because there’s no integration needed, Postrio will work right off the standard objects in Litify and Docrio. This also means that if you’d like to pass through the mailing costs to your client, Postrio can take those expenses and push them right along in the billing process.

Postrio is possible because Litify was built on Salesforce. The Salesforce platform allows for people to easily create apps on top of it. As soon as you identify a need, you can start figuring out how to deliver it. When we were first starting with Postrio, we decided to partner with a Salesforce consulting company, MicronetBD, that I’ve worked with in the past. That’s how somebody who runs a law firm can create an app like this: find a technology partner who understands the development side of the technology and who can translate your legal needs into the operational requirements of a tech product. 2022 will be the year where we get Postrio off the ground and start bringing it to everybody else.

Q: Have you seen any results from the platform that can help quantify positive outcomes from Litify?
A: We’ve seen an uptick in a lot of our key metrics. Our team is growing at a pretty regular pace, and each person can now manage so much more in terms of caseload. I’d say we’re handling more than a 100% increase in outbound referrals each month.

That’s just the referral business, but in terms of case management, we’ve also been able to move away from having our principal attorneys managing every single case. In 2018, we could only manage about four lawyers with the partners touching every single case. Now, we’ve more easily grown to a staff of seven lawyers. Being on the platform and continuing to develop it will pay dividends in the years to come.

Q: Are you using the Litify Referral Network to manage your referrals?
A: Yes, the referral network has been a huge contributor to our ability to manage our referrals and actually improve sign up rates on our referrals. From 2018 to today, we’ve increased that rate from a little under 20% to over 25%. That may not immediately seem like a huge number, but when we’re doing hundreds of referrals and we can pull in that extra 5%, we build a more robust network of referral partners and also have the metrics to actually determine how well they’re doing.

Q: How else would you quantify the before and after of implementing Litfy?
A: We’ve actually gotten so far with the automation available with Litify that our attorneys can’t even remember what their jobs looked like before the platform. When they set or update the incident date, Litify automatically schedules a reminder 120 days out to make sure that it’s been filed or is ready to be filed. They’ve gotten so much time back in their days to focus on practicing law instead of chasing tasks or reminders like this. If somebody needs to cover for a deposition, the entire case is organized for them in Litify and they can easily review beforehand and get up to speed on the latest statuses and information. That’s the kind of automation and standardization that attorneys really appreciate — it’s not in the world of having a paper file well organized, it’s in having a digital asset with every single piece of information updated, organized, and automatically handled. Litify makes our best process the standard process every single time.