Truth is, it's a long list. Not only does our product contain many unique features with a number of patent applications among them, but our process for partnering with injury firms across the U.S. to understand and address their needs, and even the team we've assembled to design, build, and bring Gladiate to market are all a departure from legacy legal products. Here is a short list of the top five factors that separate Gladiate from the pack.

1. What we're building

Gladiate is really the first all-in-one, easy-to-use operating system purpose-built for personal injury. Yes, software for lawyers has existed before. We’ve seen it and we’ve helped firms recover and migrate from it. Filevine, CasePeer, Clio are some of the most common systems firms have moved from but we’ve seen a long list of legacy solutions.

Nothing else is as easy to implement, as easy to use and as comprehensive for growing personal injury law firms as Gladiate. From the fastest case creation and client signup process (patent pending 1 click fast), to electronic signature, client texting, scheduled case updates, customizable client surveys and questionnaires, and even an automated medical record request process baked into the platform. There’s nothing on the market like it.

2. How we're building

Most legal software followed a predictable path to market a decade ago. Law firm Jones & Jones hung their shingle, they got a little bigger and decide to build some tooling to manage their cases. One day, the partners looked at one another and said, “hey, we could sell this to other firms”. They stripped out the best and sold the rest. There are several massive problems with this model. First, the software was never intended to be used outside of the originating firm. This means that; ease of use, product releases and updates, and ongoing support are all lacking or missing altogether.

By contrast, Gladiate has been built in partnership with more than 100 founding personal injury attorneys, paralegals, case managers. We’ve designed the product by sitting with many different teams and understanding their cases, their clients, their workflow, and building a system that’s easy to use and handles common and repetitive tasks unique to personal injury in as few clicks as possible. Yes, we count clicks! Gladiate was designed to be easily learned and used by personal injury firms and their staff coast to coast from day 1.

3. Why we're building

I’m a lawyer by education myself, and my co-founder Brett and I have both spent the majority of our careers in technology. I’ve spent more than a decade helping top consumer brands such as Etsy and Grubhub use data to improve business operations. When I reconnected with classmates from my time at Fordham Law and many of their colleagues and friends in the plaintiff's bar, I was amazed at what I learned about their firms.

Many personal injury lawyers are extremely entrepreneurial, hungry to build and run great businesses that happen to be law firms. There is, of course, a gap between the knowledge and skill that lawyers leave law school with and the knowledge and skill to build and run a business. Attempting to fill this void is a massive industry of coaching and seminars. They all have a different name;  masterminds, million dollar days, 100 million dollar days, eight, nine, ten figure firm seminars. They all teach the same thing. You need to run, track, and measure your firm like a business. You need to know your key metrics. You need to hire the right people. You need to provide training and build the right culture. You need to implement processes that drive quality and consistency in how you manage your cases and client experience. Every single one of these sessions shares the same message and caveats it with the fact that they are willing to give away the 'secret' precisely because the real challenge is not the knowledge, it's the execution.

How does a firm owner execute with this knowledge? How do you implement these practices within your firm? How can you take these aspirational goals and translate them into daily practices for yourself and your team? Our habits define us, personally and as a business. Our processes, our systems, and our technology give us the framework to build and institutionalize our habits. This is exactly why we're building Gladiate. What firm owners really need is a powerful and yet easy to use piece of tech to run their firms. The software that has existed on the market for the last several decades is anything but intuitive and easy to use and most of it amounts to cloud based file storage not a system to run the business. We're building Gladiate to bring that powerful, easy-to-use, run your business platform to founding personal injury firm owners and their teams.

4. How we're supporting firms

Most lawyers have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder with technology. The legal software market has given lawyers no reason to trust or believe them. Each day we hear from firm founders and legal support staff that have been lied to or burned by legal software providers. “They told me it was a 1 year contract and I went to sign it and they changed it to 3 years.” “They told me it would integrate with my existing system but then after I bought it, I found out I had to login and manage it separately”. “They told me I used my allotted support time and that it would cost me hundreds of dollars per hour for them to respond to my question”.

This is no surprise. See #2 above. Most legal software providers never intended to be in the business of building and supporting their legal software product. Our approach to designing, building and supporting the product is vastly different.

• On day 1, every firm that joins Gladiate is given access to their Gladiate profile that looks and functions exactly like what the firm saw in their earlier product walkthroughs, demos and conversations. This sounds painfully obvious but we’ve seen so many firms come to Gladiate after they signed up for a different solution and didn’t receive what they had seen in the sales process.
• Each firm receives one-on-one onboarding. In addition to walking your team through all of the features and functionality within Gladiate, our team is on-hand to help you customize and upload your first templates, your task plans, your file folder structure, your litigation deadlines and your client surveys and questionnaires.
• You’re entire team has access to a dedicated support channel just for your firm. This ensures that the whole Gladiate team has instant eyes on any question, comment, request or need from you and your team.
• Gladiate also proactively sets regular check-ins with your team to see how you’re doing, understand what goals your firm is working toward and see how we can best support you near and long term. 

5. Who is building

As I called out above, most legal software was never intended to be built, supported and maintained. This makes perfect sense to anyone who has used legal software. Most products were not built by full-time product and engineering teams dedicated to not only building but improving and supporting their product. Most legal software is the result of lawyers emailing rough descriptions of what they wanted to far-flung development studios and shops. The consulting teams push some code and move on to the next project. 

At Gladiate, we’ve built a product and engineering organization from day 1. Our team consists of full time software engineers and developers who are all-in on helping design and build software to improve your firm operations. This isn’t a temporary project or something a development shop is slapping together in two weeks. We’re a team of true believers that are committed to constantly improving ourselves, our code, our company and our processes so that we can give founding personal injury attorneys and staff the tools to build their best firm. 

Interested in learning more about what makes Gladiate unique? Reach out, say hello! perry@gladiatelaw.com