I learned to program on an Apple II in elementary school in 1985; a time when writing code that made a box open was absolutely magical. Video games weren’t much more advanced. In college came the excitement of email and then learning HTML to share/collaborate with web pages.
In adulthood as a private investigator helping AmLaw 50 law firms and Fortune 100 companies in their legal battles, every year brought easier access to public (and private) data through the web. But despite increasing access to data from our desktops, we still used primitive methods to keep track and present information. We’d make paper lists of login data, print out dozens of pages of search results, keep notes in word docs or notebooks, and then manually manufacture a report to the client from all this work. We grew the company 10X within a few years. More clients, more employees, same process.
The anxiety and wasted time was excruciating. Late nights, unbillable time, blown budgets and stressed-out associates. All in the name of excellent work product.
Sound familiar?
There had to be a better way. I thought: let’s keep the associates and partners doing what they love and do well; and let’s take away the redundant and repetitive work they don't. Easy, right? Not really. Undaunted I created a skunkworks development team of two, and together we built workflow software for the firm's staff.
The result was thrilling: products that associates immediately adopted and, best of all from a managing partner point-of-view, increased cash to the bottom line. I was re-hooked on the joy of building technology.
My partners and I created FactBox to solve this unaddressed pain we knew first hand: staying on top of all the complex information in a case and delivering exceptional work product from it.
We knew from experience that the key to adoption in professional services is: (1) not requiring anyone change their existing work process; (2) showing immediate value; and (3) tying the benefits to real cash on the bottom line. We’re ecstatic to deliver the solution to you today: FactBox
And personally speaking, the ingenuity of FactBox delivers the same feeling of magic as those early Apple II programming days, now in a modern SaaS 2.0 way.