He built a $20M business.
Then he needed a lawyer.

I am not a lawyer. I want to be upfront about that before anything else, because I think it matters when someone is building software your practice depends on.

I'm an entrepreneur. I built My Amazon Guy from my kitchen table into a 400-person agency serving hundreds of brands across the world. I know what it means to run a business — to make payroll, to manage clients who are counting on you, to lose sleep over cash flow, and to slowly build something real out of nothing.

That background is why I think I was able to see something that people inside the legal industry may have stopped noticing: the software attorneys use every day is built for the software company, not for the law firm.

In November 2024, I began what would become a year-long process — a divorce. It was difficult in the ways these things always are. Among many things it required was working closely with attorneys over an extended period of time, with the decree only recently signed.

I watched my lawyers struggle with their own tools. I watched them apologize for slow document retrieval. I watched billing statements arrive that were confusing even to me — a person who runs a business and reads financial statements for a living. I watched smart, capable professionals spend real time on administrative friction that had nothing to do with helping me.

And I kept thinking: I've seen this problem before. This is the same problem I solved for e-commerce brands — too many disconnected tools, too much manual work between them, too much money going to software vendors instead of into the business that actually serves clients.

I started asking questions. I talked to attorneys at different sized firms. I asked what software they used, what they liked, what frustrated them. The answers were remarkably consistent: most firms were using Clio or something like it, paying per-attorney fees that added up to thousands per month, and still stitching together separate tools for CRM, email, accounting, and document management.

Clio is not a bad product. It is a well-funded, professionally run company that has done more than almost anyone to bring law firm management into the modern era. I respect what they built.

But Clio is now a mature public-market-valued company with a $3 billion valuation. Their incentives have shifted. Their product decisions are made by committees. Their pricing is designed to grow revenue, not to help small firms. A 10-attorney firm on Clio Advanced — with the AI add-on, the CRM add-on, and LEDES export — pays over $2,000 a month. That same firm pays us $999, with every feature included.

The add-on model is the tell. When a software company starts charging separately for features that should be core — AI tools, client intake forms, accounting integrations — it means they've decided to extract value from existing customers rather than compete on product quality. That's a mature company protecting margins, not a builder trying to solve your problem.

So before writing a single line of code, we did the work. We mapped Clio's entire feature set — every tier, every add-on, every gate. We did the same for MyCase, Smokeball, and Filevine. We interviewed attorneys at solo practices and firms with thirty people. We reviewed bar association ethics opinions on cloud storage and client data. We studied IOLTA compliance requirements state by state. We built a specification that reflected what legal professionals actually need, not what was easiest to ship.

The result is a platform built to the standards the legal industry requires — multi-tenant security enforced at the database level, trust accounting designed to pass bar audits, and AI tools built around real attorney workflows. Not a pivot. Not a repurposed generic SaaS product. Built from scratch for this specific problem.

I've spent the last two years talking to attorneys at every size of firm — solo practitioners just starting out, managing partners at firms with 30 people, practice area specialists who have been doing this for decades. A few things became clear.