Loading...
Jim Andresen is the COO of TorHoerman Law and the founder of Law Works. In the episode, he explains how disconnected legal software created reporting gaps and manual work, and why his team built an AI-native operating system to unify case data and workflows.
461. The Tech Stack That Was Costing TORKLAW Cases—And the AI-Native OS Built to Replace It | Jim Andresen, TORKLAW & LawWorks
Executive Summary
This episode explores how fragmented law firm software stacks create reporting blind spots, manual work, and costly operational drag. Jim Andreson, COO of TorHoerman Law and founder of Law Works, explains why his team built an AI-native operating system to unify intake, case management, documents, and data across the full lifecycle of a case. He and Chris Dreyer discuss the importance of controlling firm data as AI becomes more central to legal operations, and how better infrastructure creates real leverage for growth. The conversation also turns to go-to-market strategy for personal injury firms entering competitive markets, and the practical realities of building teams that can execute at scale.
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 is not 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 that Rankings took home six, count them, six Clutch Global Awards for SEO and advertising.
That's proof, not promises. So proud of my team.
Rankings is bringing 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.
And it takes this system here, a case management tool there, and before you know it, nothing talks to each other.
And so you have to make adaptations when you end up with Zapier spaghetti, and you end up with spreadsheets all over the place to fill in gaps.
You have copy-and-paste errors and sync issues.
That disconnected mess is costing you time, money, and cases.
Today, Jim Andreson, COO of TorHoerman Law and founder of Law Works, 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.
Chris Dreyer: Big picture, what is Law Works? Give me the through line, what it is, and then we'll jump in there.
Jim Andreson: It's simple. It's an AI-native operating system designed specifically for law firms like ours.
And it's a web-based system.
It's not generic Salesforce.
We don't have licensing issues and limitations that are put on us by some of these other add-on type 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 TorHoerman Law.
And we know that there are a lot of firms that operate similar 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 we have some pieces in place to help you stay focused and not get lost in all the opportunities and options that are available.
Chris Dreyer: You've said your biggest breakthrough was fixing one department. It was recognized as a real problem, the gaps between... What was the exact moment or metric that made you realize the connective tissue, the connecting of your systems, was broken?
Jim Andreson: I've been doing this for 13, 14 years, something like that. Over time, you begin to accumulate different products, different tools, to achieve a result.
And so if you're a firm, 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 the result of that is, sometimes, you have disparate systems that don't connect at all.
And you find that some vendors, some systems lock you in and 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.
You have to copy and paste.
And they have to migrate files over and bring it back.
And then you find out that the data types don't match, and that 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, 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 just got 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 it ourselves.
And so we hired some very smart people, and we started building what is Law Works today.
Chris Dreyer: Let me dig into that. So there's Lead Docket, Domo, Lead Docket Filevine, Domo kind of combos, pretty common. And then the RingCentrals and Amazon Connects. And then you've got Salesforce, a little bit more open. Maybe they're doing the Amazon Connect, different phone systems there, a little bit freer on the API and the ability to plug in things. What was the tech stack that you were kind of Frankensteining together, and what were some of those limitations that you ran into?
Jim Andreson: Sure. I'm not wanting to bash anybody.
We are still on Litify Rocket. We haven't migrated away from them.
We have been a Casepeer shop, and again, I think that they built one of the more intuitive systems, and I think it had a lot of strengths, and it's an easy one to get started with.
But we did find that we had a hard time getting our data out, and still do there.
We were going to connect a phone system. We've had dealers direct with Twilio.
We built a lot of responses, 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.
Once you realize that Frankenstein stack 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 lifecycle under one roof, Jim took back total ownership of his firm's data and finally eliminated that dreaded vendor lock-in.
Chris Dreyer: So are we talking full lifecycle, or are we talking phone rings, the operating system has AI capabilities, or it's like CRM and project management? Talk to me about operating system. Is it full lifecycle, end to end? Is it including intake?
Jim Andreson: Yeah. That's a great question.
And the answer is what it is and what it's becoming.
But today, as it stands, we handle pre-litigation and litigation from end to end.
And we're able to do document generation, AI-enabled document...
Even up and Eve, 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 hope is, the belief is, that from the first phone call all the way until settlement, we're going to be able to handle things.
And one of the cool things, the things 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 freely and go if you want to, and your data is your data.
If you prefer the product that EvenUp or Eve, or pick your document generation company, or whatever, we want you to be able to easily push it there, bring it right back in, and if that's the solution that you prefer for that piece, that functionality, it's your data, it's your cases, you do what you want with it.
And so we really are 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, a developer portal.
And so third parties, with their tooling and opportunities, can build on top of our system in a fashion that is similar to Salesforce, where you can build within the ecosystem and have your product offering available on the platform.
All the underlying infrastructure is in place, and so it's going to be pretty versatile.
Chris Dreyer: The data is becoming more important than ever because now, whether you're using Snowflake, BigQuery, or what have you, it's now being formed as a basis for all the AI intelligence and decision-making.
I never thought in a million years that a company like ours would be talking to Snowflake, right?
But here we are.
It's a component of data housing.
So where do you see the usage of data making an impact, and just the importance of controlling that and having control of that data, where AI is at particularly right now?
Jim Andreson: Context is the thing that is shaping the quality of the output that 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 want to have full control of it on our system so that we can pass it to the models that are going to be manipulating, reading, learning off of it, and writing from it.
And so our intention is to... We have a structured data system.
We have the ability to OCR, pull structured data out of unstructured documents, place that into your record of truth and source of truth, and then be able to generate documents out of that.
And so that's something that we don't have now.
I'm going to take now, and recenter our data.
TorHoerman Law's data has lived on Box, which is a universal file management system.
Our cases lived in Casepeer.
We had a hard time getting our data, our case data, and our unstructured data from Box, and then pushing it to one of these demand generators or medical summarizers, 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 the 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 that, be able to pass that cleanly to a model that's going to be doing that work.
One of the things that we're building with Law Works is that other firms that will be able to be on the platform will benefit from the wider ecosystem.
So we'll still be passing your data as your data, and it doesn't get shared with other firms.
But we will be able to benchmark and see how you are comparing 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 much, and this is favorable in these situations, and be able to say, how are you tracking comparatively to others, and identify opportunities, identify bottlenecks that are common, 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, in the platform that we've come from.
And so I think that that's an interesting thing there.
Chris Dreyer: Yeah, I see all the amazing benefits and just massive unlocks for the future, having control of that.
And there are going to be more capabilities that arise every day.
Just the pace at which new developments are occurring is exponential.
Jim Andreson: Yeah, it's unbelievable.
I sit on X, Twitter, whatever we call it these days, and every day there is just a breakthrough, a new product, a new opportunity.
It's just unbelievable, the pace of innovation.
And so to be able to connect all those pieces together is really what we're hoping to do, and I think really unlock some opportunity for firms and owners and the future of law.
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 TorHoerman 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 to 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.
Chris Dreyer: I wanted to switch over to TorHoerman Law. You've been COO, your background includes working with another big PI firm in the past, so you've had different go-to-market strategies in order to acquire leads. And TorHoerman Law is multi-state, in big markets. So 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 billboards for years? How do you think about trying to go into these markets?
Jim Andreson: I think you've got two different games that get played.
You've 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, reputation-type referrals, it's always been the precision approach.
And it may be higher cost per touchpoint, but the acquisition price, as long as you can make the numbers work, usually has benefited us.
In terms of going to market, at least in the early days, it was really like, can we find a license to work here, and can we acquire a license?
And so we would get somebody in the firm, by acquisition or by just going through the process, we'd get a license in your state, and we can function and we can operate, we could do whatever the minimum thing was, if we had to set up an office there, had a physical location, and we'd target and be positioned with our marketing, see what worked there.
It's interesting to see how tactics that actually 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 going to take that to California, and it just falls flat.
There are versioned 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 run a very successful marketing firm, and you've got to 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 in terms of matching the messaging, and it returns well for you, and then obviously you get to 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 Brazil and his brother, Carusho, and TorHoerman Law, they're not afraid to try things.
And so we've always been a firm that will try things and be okay to fail and try the next thing.
And when something works, we will ride it until it doesn't work and add it to the stable of things that work.
And as things drop off, they drop off. Maybe we'll revisit them, maybe we won't.
Chris Dreyer: That's great. Love that mindset.
And I think you've got to do the bullets before bombs and do the testing and find out what works.
And you're right, because some... You take Google Ads, Google Search, and it's auction-based.
So if one market's lighter than another, that could throw off your CAC.
It could be anything. It could be broadcast television, radio, whatever, depending upon what's saturated, what's not saturated, and your competitors' messaging, what resonates, like what you said.
So that makes sense to me for sure.
Chris Dreyer: In regards to working in an organization of the size that you've worked at, what other common bottlenecks do you see? Is it hiring? Is it talent? Talent is always an issue.
You want to get A players, but there are different levels, like finding the pre-lit attorney or the litigation attorney.
Talk to me about some of the other common bottlenecks that you see.
Jim Andreson: The bottleneck moves.
I think that's the biggest thing.
You solve them once, but you actually just create a bottleneck somewhere else.
And so my brain is limited to kind of the idea of a pipeline, and you've got just the visual of where the thing pinches and where it bloats.
And I don't know that there's any magic bullet to solve any of these problems.
What I do think... You remember the movie *Moneyball* that came out, 20 years ago, something like that?
Chris Dreyer: Oh yeah. Billy Beane.
Jim Andreson: Yeah. The idea is that you go out and you acquire value.
And so I love the idea of A players, and they're great and they're fantastic.
And you can get some high-value people that maybe don't have the right experience level, but they're intelligent and problem-solvers.
And maybe you've got somebody who's got experience but can't get a thing across the line, or again just can't get that final piece of execution.
And so you find people that can complement each other, and the high value, and the things that you can coach, and you bring those people in, that talent.
And it's easy to say and 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, fresh out of college, 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 rough around some edges, and they get things done.
And so I love the puzzle of it.
I hate the process of it, but constructing a team is a fun thing to do.
Chris Dreyer: Well, Jim, if our audience has any questions for you and wants to connect, or learn more about Law Works, what's the best way to get in touch?
Jim Andreson: Email is probably the best.
`jim@torclaw.com` if you want to talk about AI and all things operations in a law firm.
`jim@lawworks.com` if you want to talk about the operating system or being a part of our customer base.
And you have to be awesome to connect with people on my own smartphones.
Chris Dreyer: Amazing. Jim, thanks for coming on the show.
Jim Andreson: Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.
A massive thank you to Jim Andreson 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 matters, winning cases and driving revenue.
Taking control of your data and adopting a Moneyball mindset to build your team are not 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 over to `ranking.io`.
I'm Chris Dreyer, and we'll see you next time on Personal Injury Mastermind.