Split the check-in from the case update. At Singleton Schreiber, the case manager still owns treatment, family, documents, and deposition dates. A separate team spends 40 hours a week having conversations that go beyond the file. "I see Bob had a shoulder surgery last week. How'd that go?" Bob is the husband. Somebody even asks about the cat. Brett has text updates and letters, and he still pays people to pick up the phone. His reasoning: "You know what no one has ever complained about? Is that their lawyer calls them too much."

Make the cadence the KPI. Every one of 16,000 to 18,000 clients hears from a person every three weeks, no matter where the case sits. Brett doesn't call it a KPI, but the three-week window gives the firm a number it can track. Here's the test: Pull your ten oldest open files and find the date a human last spoke to each client.

Put social workers on the problems the lawsuit doesn't fix. This is the part I had never heard of a law firm doing. Brett's logic: Car wreck or wildfire, the same four problems show up in his clients' lives—money, housing, food, medical care. Who deals with that all day? Social workers. He says he's the form guy at his law firm and still can't get through a Social Security disability appeal. His social workers can. The same team runs a resiliency group for staff on burnout, boundaries, and secondhand trauma, and as many as 200 employees show up. At 30 people, I wouldn't make this a full-time hire. I'd start with a few contracted hours a week.

Bring in an operator before you think you can afford one. A friend who sold her technology company told Brett that around 50 or 60 employees, a firm needs people whose only job is to make the trains run on time. He was at home one weekend googling the labor code for his employee handbook, so he took the advice. He started with a fractional C-suite led by a former defense-firm COO, then hired full time once the firm outgrew it. At $1 million in revenue, he says, $10,000 to $30,000 buys an engagement that will interview your people and map how a file moves. It took me 13 years to build a C-suite at Rankings, and I should have done it sooner.

Ask your people why they stay. Brett's question is why anyone waits for the exit interview to find out what's broken. A third party runs his anonymous stay interviews, on top of climate surveys and 360 reviews. We run exit interviews at Rankings and had never once thought to ask the question the other way around. Your intake and case staff hear a client's frustration before you do.

Ask whether they are a certified Google Ads partner. Google's top partner tier has spend requirements an agency must meet year after year. Ask for the tier by name and ask them to show it.

Ask how much ad budget they manage each month. In PI, I figure about $3,000 to acquire an auto case through paid search, and you want 10 shots at a signed case before you judge the channel. That puts the floor for a Google Ads test at $30,000. If they have never managed budgets at that level, they have not run PI at the scale it takes.

Fund the test long enough to read it. Google Ads and Facebook Ads both need time and data before their systems learn which of your ads to show to which people. If it were my money, I would commit at least $100,000 to a channel before I decide whether it works, whether that channel is Google Ads, Local Services Ads, or lead generation. I know that number scares people. Kill a campaign early and you may kill the one that was about to work.

Set up Apple Business first. The place card is the ad's landing page. Claim the location, then delegate ad management to your agency through Apple Business.

Pick the placement and the map. Target by ZIP code, city, state, or distance from an office.

Control the query. Let Apple's Search Match choose the searches your ad shows on, or set keyword phrases and categories yourself. Add negatives, meaning the searches you don't want your ad to show on.

Isolate the budget and the phone number. One campaign, one office, one case type, its own tracking line, so intake can trace a Maps tap to a qualified call and a signed case. Apple reports taps and directions. Judge it on signed cases.

The edge is the caseload, and MX2 sits on it. A national firm's records, demands, and outcomes give the system patterns no single-market firm can match. In Morgan's words, the firms that lead "don't just license an AI tool," their attorneys "inform the AI models with their own knowledge and experience."

Buy MX2 and you buy from your biggest competitor. The firm that outspends you on TV in your market would also hold your workflow, and possibly your data patterns. Ask what a vendor agreement says about that before 2027.

The parts exist today from vendors that do not compete with you. Record retrieval, chronologies, and demand drafting are on the market now (see Tool of the Week). Nobody has to wait for MX2 to get the workflow.

"Invitation only" means Morgan & Morgan picks the buyers. Morgan & Morgan has not said which firms, or at what price. Whether it reaches a 12-lawyer shop in Ohio is a future question.

OpenAI Ships a Legal Version of Its Frontier Model: OpenAI introduced Astra for Law on Sept. 17, GPT-6 Astra paired with a legal search index, legal analysis instructions, and 26 plugins to tools like iManage, Intapp, and Thomson Reuters. The index draws on Free Law Project's CourtListener, which OpenAI says covers more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law, inside a corpus of more than 230 million URLs. On the Vals AI Legal Research Bench, 200 U.S. legal research questions, Astra for Law scored 54.0% correct against 38.7% for the same model with web search. Access starts through a Trusted Access Program for selected firms in ChatGPT and Codex, with API access to follow. The launch names Sullivan & Cromwell, Ropes & Gray, Cooley, Latham & Watkins, and Wachtell as collaborators, and no plaintiffs' firms.

Google Says Old Low-Value Pages Can Hold a Site Back After Cleanup: Google Search Advocate John Mueller said Google's systems may still judge a site by low-value pages it published in the past, even after the site changes. In a Bluesky reply to a site owner who had generated pages from combinations of domain names, technologies, and attributes, Mueller wrote that such programmatic SEO "often leads to a site that's either spam, borderline spam, or low quality" and that Google's systems "have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages." The fix, he said, "tends to take time & significant effort to show the value." He named no ranking system, threshold, or recovery timeline. Google's spam policies treat pages created mainly to manipulate rankings as scaled content abuse "no matter how it's created."

Keller Postman Founders Launch an MSO for PI Firms: Ashley Keller, Warren Postman, and Adam Gerchen, the mass-tort firm's founders and the CEO of litigation funder Gerchen Capital Partners, have launched Atticor Group, a management services organization for personal injury firms, Bloomberg Law reported Sept. 2. More than six firms have signed on, according to a person familiar with the matter, who did not name them. Atticor has more than 80 employees, many of them former Keller Postman and Gerchen Capital staff, and it has not named its investors. A job listing earlier this year described the company as an "AI-native services business" with a regional acquisition strategy and a "de novo nationwide brand." Keller Postman, Atticor, and Gerchen did not respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment.

Boston Scientific Recalls Spinal Cord Stimulator Leads After 1,081 Serious Injuries: The FDA classified the recall of Boston Scientific's unused Infinion CX leads as Class I, its most serious category, MassDevice reported. The company says the lead body can fracture or show high impedance under mechanical stress at the anchor site, which can mean inadequate stimulation or surgery to remove and replace the lead. Boston Scientific had reported 1,081 serious injuries tied to the issue as of May 27. The recall covers about 1,079 unused leads, most of them outside the United States, and does not reach devices already implanted. In June, lawsuits over Boston Scientific's stimulators went into MDL 3181 before Judge Josephine Staton in the Central District of California.

3M, DuPont, and Honeywell Must Face Firefighters' PFAS Gear Lawsuit: A federal judge in Hartford ruled that more than 20 defendants must face claims that firefighters' protective gear leached "forever chemicals" into their bodies and raised their cancer risk, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judge Alvin Thompson held that 13 firefighter unions have standing to sue and that firefighters can seek damages and medical monitoring without symptoms of disease. Plaintiffs' lawyers call the proposed class action, filed in June 2024, the first aimed at firefighter gear alone. The complaint names 3M's Scotchlite, DuPont's Kevlar, and Honeywell-made gear. In 2023, 3M, DuPont, and two other companies paid more than $11 billion to settle PFAS drinking-water claims.

Two tools, two deadlines. A firm can set up a qualified settlement fund (QSF) any time before the money hits its IOLTA account, even after the parties sign the settlement agreement. A plaintiff recovery trust, the fix for the attorney-fee double tax, only works if the parties write it into the settlement agreement before anyone signs.

The QSF is no longer a big-case tool. Ten or 20 years ago one cost around $10,000 and took months to open, so firms skipped it. Eastern Point opens one within a business day at minimal cost. Rachel's rule of thumb: anything over $250,000 goes in, for the FDIC coverage alone. It also takes lien resolution and claimant distributions off the firm's desk.

The 2017 tax law double-taxes emotional distress and punitive damages. Physical injury settlements under Section 104(a)(2) stay tax-free. In taxable cases, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took away the plaintiff's deduction for attorney fees, and the 2025 tax law made that permanent. The plaintiff owes tax on money that went to the lawyer. Rachel calls it the silent killer, because it never touches the firm's fee. The client feels it at tax time the next year.

The fix is a plaintiff recovery trust. Eastern Point co-developed it with Larry Eisenberg of Forward Giving. Her example: On a $10 million taxable settlement, the trust can leave the client about $2 million better off than a check to the IRS. She says the structure has put $65 million back in plaintiffs' pockets so far.

Make your paralegals the issue spotters. The lawyer doesn't have to solve the tax problem. Someone at the firm has to spot it before the client signs. Rachel's script for the client: "There may be tax implications here that could impact your net recovery. Let's bring in an expert to look this over." Paralegals hear the cues first, including the one that matters for benefits: A client on government assistance who receives funds into the IOLTA can lose eligibility on the spot.

Retrieval is the product. Tavrn requests records from providers nationwide and replaces the calls and faxes with a status board. It says requests come back an average of 12 days faster.

The chronology links every line to a source. Diagnoses, treatment dates, and providers go into a structured summary, and each entry links back to its record.

The demand is a first draft, built for editing. Upload the incident report and the records, and Tavrn fills a demand with injuries, expenses, and a treatment timeline in minutes. The firm edits and exports it.

It plugs into the case management system you already run. Tavrn integrates with SmartAdvocate, Clio, Litify, Smokeball, and the major file stores, so records and drafts land in the case file.