On August 20 we sat down with YoCierge and Hona for a panel presented by BridgeTower Media. The premise was that client experience gets decided in three specific places: the records at the front of the case, the status of the case in the middle, and the updates in between. One panelist per moment.
What we did not plan was that all three would end up in the same place. Andy said it first, Bryan repeated it back to him on air, and Matt closed on it. If you only have five minutes, that thread is the part worth reading.
The thread all three landed on
About four minutes in, Andy Stangroom of YoCierge said something that reframed the rest of the hour:
“In personal injury law, the product is not just legal work. The product is trust.”
Andy Stangroom, Sales Director, YoCierge
Three people who sell three different things, agreeing that efficiency is the input and not the goal. Andy put the test plainly: if efficiency does not turn into better communication, better responsiveness or a better outcome for the relationship, it is incomplete.
That is the frame for everything below.
Moment one: the records the client never sees
Andy’s segment was about medical records retrieval, which is the least visible work in a personal injury case and, he argued, one of the most decisive.
The work itself is familiar. Requests to providers, repeated follow-ups, multiple portals, missing documents, fees and authorizations, and the running question of what has and has not come back. His point was about what the client sees of it, which is nothing:
“The client doesn’t see the follow-ups. They don’t see the administrative effort. They don’t see the complexity behind the scenes. They only experience one thing: how often their attorney communicates with them, and how informed they feel about their case.”
Andy Stangroom, YoCierge
He called that the gap between internal effort and external perception, and said it is where firms lose ground on relationships they have already earned.
Two things stood out in how he talked about closing it.
The first is that his company still runs over 300 human records retrieval specialists doing phone calls, faxes and email. AI sits alongside them: flagging where records are missing, tracking outstanding requests, catching provider overcharges before delivery so the requester can approve, cancel or adjust the scope, and pulling medical and radiology records electronically the same day, usually inside 30 minutes.
The second is what he thinks the speed is actually for. Not the speed itself. The conversation it changes:
“Instead of the general check-ins, they ask for more specific, meaningful questions. Hey, I see you followed up with orthopedics, how’d that appointment go? Are you still experiencing symptoms? Has your treatment plan changed? Those conversations build trust in a way that generic updates never can, because the client feels seen, not just represented.”
Andy Stangroom, YoCierge
He was also blunt about what does not win work:
“Clients do not choose a personal injury firm because it has the most advanced systems. They choose a firm because they believe the firm will fight for them, will communicate with them, will not let their case fall through the cracks, and will treat them like a person, not a file.”
Andy Stangroom, YoCierge
Which leads to the version of the claim he thinks holds up. Not “we use AI.” Instead: we have more time and better systems to take care of you.
Moment two: you cannot report a status you cannot see
Bryan took the middle of the case, and opened with the constraint everything else in his segment hangs on:
“You cannot update the client on the status of their case if you don’t know the status of their case.”
Bryan Billig, Assembly Software
His answer starts before any AI. Workflow management per case type: for every case type the firm handles, the list of tasks that has to happen every time, who owns each one, and when it is due. He calls the result a case factory, which is the point of the name Assembly.
He also addressed the objection that senior staff do not need to be told what to do next. That is only half of what the task list is for:
“Having that task list for all your cases means you know exactly where each individual case is in the process.”
Bryan Billig, Assembly Software
Group those tasks into phases, investigation, negotiation, settlement, and you get a view of the whole inventory and a way to manage the pipeline. It also creates something useful for the client, which is where his segment connects to Matt’s. A case crossing from investigation into negotiation is a real threshold, and a natural moment to tell the client what to expect next.
On AI, Bryan made a distinction worth borrowing. Most of the noise is about generating: emails, letters, pleadings, demand letters. Useful, but it crowds out the other half:
“My favorite type of AI features are what I call consumptive AI. Instead of just generating content, it consumes content that you provide it, such as medical records.”
Bryan Billig, Assembly Software
Read the incoming records, extract the medical detail, pull the financial items out of invoices, put them where they belong, and use them to keep a current summary of the case. What the case is about, who is running point, where it stands, and the key financials:
“Gone are the days of opening up a case and having to spend an hour reading files, swapping between tabs, reviewing all of this data in different locations to get up to speed.”
Bryan Billig, Assembly Software
His argument for keeping that AI inside the case management system rather than beside it is context. An AI that lives where the work happens can see the whole file, which is what makes a fast answer possible when something is buried.
Moment three: the client hears from the case, not about it
Matt runs Hona, which many firms know as the case tracker their clients log into. His segment was about what changed when those updates stopped being templates.
He brought the numbers. Across his platform last year: over 20 million text messages with plaintiffs, over a million plaintiffs engaged, over 1,000 firms. And inside that data, the pattern his whole argument rests on. Roughly 80 percent of client communication is the same twenty questions or themes, over and over. Those questions deserve answers. But a case manager carrying 100, 200, in one case more than 500 cases cannot context switch that many times a day and stay responsive.
Then he gave the number that got the most reaction.
14 business hours is the median time to answer an inbound client text message. Hona platform data, among firms already running a client communication platform.
“There’s eight business hours in a typical day. That means they’re not getting a response till the next business day in most cases.”
Matt McLellan, Hona
That is the median among firms already using a client communication platform, which is to say among firms that have already decided this matters. Thirty percent of those inbound texts arrive after hours.
The difference he was pointing at is not speed alone, it is what the message knows. His before and after:
Template: “Hey, the phase has now changed to the demand phase. That means we’re now going to go collect your records.”
With context: “Hey, the legal staff has updated your case to the demand phase. We have most of your records in already, but we’re still waiting on a couple to start drafting the demand. We’ll let you know if there’s anything else needed.”
Same event. The second one knows which doctors the client saw, which records came back, and which bills are still outstanding. That context comes from the case management system, which is why the integration matters more than the messaging.
He was equally clear about the 20 percent that does not get automated. In his own example, a client asked whether they should talk to the insurance adjuster. The AI declined it, flagged it, and told the client their case manager would call in the morning. The case manager got the escalation with a drafted reply she could send or edit, and the system learns from her edits.
On results, he pointed at care coordination. One firm went from tracking 75 percent treatment compliance to 86 percent medical appointment compliance 90 days later, and about 70 percent of routine treatment outreach is now handled entirely by AI. A client of his in New Jersey carries 240 cases, monitors escalations, and still gets on the phone with every client at least once a month. What changed is what that call sounds like:
“It’s not, what doctors have you seen in the last three or four weeks? It’s, hey, looks like you’ve been to Dr. Anderson and Dr. Reyes in the past month, how are they treating you? It’s much less about redundant data collection, and much more about trust.”
Matt McLellan, Hona
Where it ended
The last exchange between Bryan and Matt is the one worth keeping.
Matt asks attorneys and case managers a hypothetical: if you only had one case to manage, how would you manage it? The answers are always the same. Talk to the client multiple times a week. Follow up right after the appointment. Ask what changed, ask about referrals. And then, of course, that is impossible with 200 cases.
Bryan’s response:
“It’s not the only case for the law firm, but it is the only case for the client. For them, it is a one-to-one experience. For you, it may be one to 250, 500. But for them, this is the only thing. And if you can treat everyone like it’s the only thing for you, that’s tremendous.”
Bryan Billig, Assembly Software
Q&A from the session
Do clients know they are talking with an AI, and how do they react?
“I have a very strong thesis that if you’re trying to convince your customer they’re not talking to AI, you’ve also missed the mark. We should be transparent.”
Matt McLellan, Hona
His recommendation is to mention it at intake, and to give the AI its own signature in the text message, something like “the firm’s care coordinator,” so it never reads as coming from the client’s case manager by name.
On reaction, his data goes the other way from what most firms expect. Engagement rates, response rates and thread length are all higher than when humans wrote the messages. His explanation is responsiveness. A case manager sends a text, the client replies two minutes later, the case manager has already moved to the next task, and the thread stalls until tomorrow. When replies come back quickly, more gets settled in one exchange.
He also pointed at message shape. A case manager who needs three things sends one long block, because they have to move on. The AI asks one thing at a time. In his example it asked for a driver’s license photo, looked at what came in, and said: that looks like I also need the back side, sorry, I didn’t mention that.
Bryan’s summary of the difference: an AI that generates something specific to that conversation, versus a template that goes out Thursdays at 2:00.
What do clients complain about most when it comes to their medical records?
“It always comes back to waiting. Tom Petty, waiting’s the hardest part.”
Andy Stangroom, YoCierge
The client has already been through the accident, the treatment and the appointments. Then the records become the bottleneck, and what they hear is that the firm is still waiting on a provider. Andy’s point is that the difficulty of a provider’s portal is not the client’s problem. “They just want to know, is my case moving forward?”
His answer is visibility rather than a promise. The firm can see every detail of the effort, who was contacted and where the request is stuck, in the retrieval portal and in the case management system. And when a provider blows past the 30-day HIPAA window, they file a dispute.
When a client calls asking where the case is, how should a firm be set up so anyone can answer on the spot?
Bryan gave three parts.
- Process by case type. Every case is different in some way, but they should all move through a defined process. One for motor vehicle accidents, one for medical malpractice, one for premises liability, each with its own tasks and phases. Then anyone can see the case type and where it sits.
- A summary instead of a search. Rather than opening four places to reconstruct the story, have the system read everything and hand back the current state of the case.
- Phone integration. Clients call from cell phones, which are uniquely identifiable. An integrated phone system pops the case before the call is answered.
“You know who it is, and have the case open and the summary available to you before you click that green telephone icon. So you are ahead of the game before the game even starts.”
Bryan Billig, Assembly Software
How do you find out when a client misses a treatment appointment?
We polled the room on this one, and the majority answered that they do not really track it.
Matt estimated only 10 to 20 percent of firms track actual appointments, as opposed to tracking which providers a client is seeing, and his argument for tracking them is case value rather than client experience. A referral for an MRI that surfaces two weeks late leaves a gap in the treatment record, and insurers read gaps as evidence the injury was not serious.
His example: a case manager set an alert on any MRI. He got the notification, called the imaging facility, had the images within the hour, spotted a shoulder tear, and had the client in with an orthopedic surgeon the next day rather than two or three weeks later.
If you want the shorter version
- Client experience is decided in three places, and two of them are invisible to the client.
- The client is not evaluating your software. They are deciding whether they feel taken care of.
- You cannot tell a client where their case is until your own system can tell you.
- Most client communication is the same twenty questions. The rest is the part that needs a person.
- Efficiency only counts once the client can feel it.
