I showed up at 9 AM, left at 5 PM, worked a normal forty-hour week. Not as a consultant watching from the corner. As one of five people on the team. Same workload, same clients, same 4 PM email pile.
The first thing every morning was the inbox. Bankruptcy clients work during the day, so they email in the evenings. I'd spend most of the morning replying, then move into prepping petitions in Jubilee. Filling in debtor information, exemptions, credit counseling. Calling clients to follow up on the documents they didn't send. The most painful part was always pay stubs: rotated phone photos, half-bent because the client propped the stub on their leg, three jobs and weekly pay so I had to read every single line by hand.
The audit-then-reaudit loop was the part that ate the day. A client sent me half of what I asked for. I'd audit their entire OneDrive folder against the checklist, write back with what was missing, they'd send another half, I'd audit again. For a long time the tracking on this was literally pen and paper, sometimes just my memory. Clio tasks never worked for us. The supervising attorney had a spreadsheet. That was the system.
I lasted six months in that seat. Long enough to know which parts of the day were genuinely hard and which parts were just software not talking to other software. Then I started building.
By the time I left, paid-in-full clients per month had gone from the firm's all-time best of 10–14 up to 62. No new hires. No replaced software. The intake stayed in Clio, the folders stayed in OneDrive. I just made them actually talk to each other, and put an agent on top to handle the file audits and draft the follow-up emails the way I would have written them.
That's the whole company. I build for firms that look like the one I worked at, because I know exactly which Tuesday they're having.
Joseph
