30 Patents
Cybersecurity. Intake scoring. Case search. Email routing. Marketing attribution. Not opinions about them — grants on them.
These did not come out of a lab. Every one started as a problem somebody had on a Tuesday inside a working plaintiffs’ firm — a case nobody could find, an email that reached no one, an intake call that should have gone to a lawyer immediately and sat in a queue instead.
Cybersecurity & Client Privacy
A plaintiffs’ firm holds the most sensitive material a person owns. Medical records. Financial records. The detailed account of the worst day of someone’s life, written down while it was still raw. Rule 1.6 does not care that your case management system was convenient to log into.
Two problems here are worth patenting your way out of. The first is who gets into the system and how you prove it — not a password, but an authentication scheme that survives a paralegal working from a hotel lobby, a contract reviewer on a personal laptop, and a former employee who left on a Friday. Three grants cover that.
The second is the one most firms never think about until it happens: your own phone system leaks. Call tracking numbers, texts to clients, a paralegal’s personal mobile surfacing on a claimant’s screen. Concealing a Personal Number was the answer to that, and it is the first patent in the portfolio — granted in 2017 and assigned not to a software company but to the law firm itself.
This is the difference between writing about law firm cybersecurity and being granted patents on it.
Your exposure isn’t theoretical and it isn’t IT’s problem. It’s the paralegal who left in March whose login still works. It’s the contract reviewer opening medical records on a personal laptop in a coffee shop. It’s a claimant with your intake specialist’s personal mobile number, forever.
Rule 1.6 doesn’t distinguish between a breach and a convenience you never got round to closing, and neither does your malpractice carrier. Most firms discover the gap during the incident.
We start where the risk actually lives: who can reach what, what happens the day someone leaves, and whether your own phone system is leaking your people’s numbers to the other side. Then we close it — using the approaches we patented rather than a checklist downloaded from a bar association PDF.
See how we approach itIntake & Case Scoring
Every plaintiffs’ firm that advertises has the same problem at the same moment: the phone rings hundreds of times a week, and somewhere in those calls are the cases that will pay for the year. You cannot put a lawyer on all of them. You cannot afford to miss the ones that matter.
So the question becomes mechanical. Is this a good case? Does a lawyer need to call this person back right now, or can it wait until Tuesday? Get that wrong in one direction and you burn attorney hours on claims that go nowhere. Get it wrong in the other and a catastrophic-injury case hangs up and calls the firm advertising on the next billboard.
The approach we patented listens for the words that actually predict a case — the buzzwords — and scores the intake on them, in the moment, so the routing decision is made on evidence instead of on whoever happened to answer. Six grants across five years, which is what it looks like when you keep prosecuting an invention because you are still using it every day.
Your worst week this year has already happened and you almost certainly don’t know which one it was. Somewhere in those calls was a catastrophic-injury case that waited on hold, got a callback on Thursday, and signed with the firm on the next billboard.
The arithmetic is brutal: one missed case can exceed a year of everything you spend on intake staff. And you can’t fix it by trying harder, because the failure isn’t effort — it’s that the routing decision gets made by whoever picked up, using whatever they happened to notice.
We make that decision on evidence. Score the call on the words that actually predict a case, route it in the moment, and measure what you were missing before. Six grants deep, because we were still using it every day.
Fix intakeCase Search & Retrieval
A firm with tens of thousands of open matters has a retrieval problem disguised as a staffing problem. Nobody can find anything, so everybody asks somebody, and the cost shows up as hours rather than as a line item anyone recognizes.
Six grants cover this in two stages. The first three are search on parameters the user defines — not the fields a vendor decided you would want three years ago, but the question you actually have this morning.
The next three are the harder half, and the one that changes how a firm runs: the system scores what it finds and raises its hand on its own. The case that has gone quiet. The file where the statute is approaching and nobody noticed. The claim that stalled at the same stage as forty others. A search you have to remember to run is a search that does not get run.
Every firm has cases quietly dying in it right now. Not from neglect — from volume. A file stalls at the same stage as forty others, the adjuster stops calling, and nobody notices until the statute is close enough to hurt.
The instinct is to hire someone to watch. That doesn’t scale, and it puts your risk on one person’s memory.
The better answer is a system that raises its hand on its own: score every file continuously, surface the ones going wrong, and tell you before it’s a problem instead of after. A report you have to remember to run is a report that doesn’t get run.
See what we’d buildEmail at Volume
This is the least glamorous thing in the portfolio and quite possibly the most valuable. A working firm receives a torrent of email — adjusters, providers, clients, opposing counsel, records vendors — and every message belongs to a matter. Getting it there is either a system or it is a person, and if it is a person it is several people.
Six grants: four on routing the message itself to the right matter in the right posture, two on the attachments, which are where the medical records live and therefore where the mistakes are expensive.
Nobody markets this. Everybody pays for it, usually in paralegal hours nobody has counted.
Nobody has ever won a case on email routing, and every firm pays for it anyway — in paralegal hours spent moving messages and attachments into the right matter, all day, every day.
It’s the purest example of a cost nobody has counted. Ask your COO what it costs to file email and you’ll get a shrug; ask what happens when a records set lands on the wrong file and you’ll get a much sharper answer.
This is the least glamorous work we do and often the fastest money. It gives you back hours you’re already buying, from people you’d rather have doing something that requires a human.
Talk about your operationsMarketing Attribution
Which advertising produced which signed case? Plaintiffs’ firms spend millions a year and answer this with a shrug, a gut feeling, or a report from the vendor selling them the advertising.
The problem is that the media buy and the intake live in different worlds. One is a spreadsheet of spots and spend; the other is a person on the phone who does not know or care which billboard they passed. Correlating them is the whole game, and it decides where next year’s budget goes.
Two grants on loading the media buy and tying it to the intakes it actually produced — cost per signed case, by source, as a fact rather than an argument.
You are spending millions and you cannot say which of it worked. Not precisely. Your vendor’s report says the vendor is doing well.
The problem isn’t reporting, it’s that the two halves live in different worlds: a spreadsheet of spots and spend on one side, and a person on the phone who neither knows nor cares which billboard they passed on the other. Nothing joins them, so the budget conversation runs on instinct and whoever argues hardest.
Cost per signed case, by source, as a fact. Once you have it, next year’s budget stops being an argument and starts being arithmetic — and the answer is usually that some of your spend is excellent and some of it has been lighting money on fire for years.
Ask us what your spend is doingInterface Design
Six design patents on the screens themselves. Not the plumbing — the thing an intake specialist looks at nine hours a day, and which decides whether the rest of the system gets used properly or gets worked around.
Four of these name Tara Williams, now Maestro’s Chief Operating Officer, as a co-inventor.
You already know the tell: your people have a workaround. A spreadsheet beside the case management system. A private naming convention. A step everyone does in a way the software didn’t intend.
That’s not a training problem, and another mandate won’t fix it. It means the screen doesn’t match the job, so the best system your firm ever bought is being routed around by the people it was bought for.
We design for the person doing it nine hours a day, because adoption is the whole return. Software nobody uses properly is just an expensive way to keep doing what you did before.
See how we buildThe Record.
Claims, drawings and prosecution history for all thirty grants.
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