Faster case resolution
Reduction in time to prepare a demand
Faster medical record review
Brian Franciskato and Dean Nash have known each other since kindergarten. After roughly a decade practicing law separately, the two lifelong friends opened Nash & Franciskato Law Firm in Kansas City, Missouri in 2004. Today, the firm handles individual-event personal injury cases, including auto accidents and nursing home abuse, as well as mass torts, with a particular focus on defective hip and knee implants.
By design, Nash & Franciskato has stayed small: three lawyers and four paralegals. But that meant increasing case volume was incredibly difficult. As caseloads grew, time on desk increased, as did the risk of potentially missing the statute of limitations. The challenge was amplified in their mass tort practice, where they could have 100 clients per case.
Franciskato was initially skeptical that EvenUp was the right solution to help them scale, thinking it was a demands-only company for large personal injury law firms. After seeing how EvenUp’s proactive AI platform could support the entire lifecycle of the firm’s cases, he realized it could help his small team scale.
Nash & Franciskato’s biggest challenge prior to EvenUp was keeping up with growing case volume, particularly as the firm looked to take on more mass torts with hundreds of clients.
Amanda Cryderman, the firm’s lead mass tort paralegal, was the first to feel the effects of a larger caseload. A significant portion of her work involves medical record review. As record volume grew, it took her longer to get up to speed on each client’s case and to notice gaps in documentation or treatment.
Before EvenUp, tracking missing records or appointments meant manually reviewing documentation against treatment dates. Often, the team relied on a client’s memory of the treatment they received, making it difficult to identify gaps in documentation, particularly for severely injured clients who had to recall appointments across multiple providers.
Cryderman says that EvenUp’s Missing Docs Check and the Medical Management Treatment Timeline are among her favorite features. While preparing a recent demand, EvenUp flagged a six-month gap in a client’s treatment history with missing records.
It might have taken me hours and hours of work piecing together the client’s treatment history to find the gap in treatment. EvenUp was able to find it almost instantly.
Amanda Cryderman
Consulting the treatment timeline and running the Missing Docs Check are now part of Cryderman’s workflow prior to sending a demand.
For Franciskato, faster, higher-quality demands are the biggest benefit of EvenUp. Demands that could take an experienced paralegal three weeks to write can now be generated in 20 minutes with EvenUp’s Express Demands™.
Franciskato also appreciates the billing codes that are included in every EvenUp demand. He thinks these codes help reduce the time to reach a settlement because adjusters often use software that scans for billing codes – a key factor in their initial offer. By removing ambiguity around the billing codes, Franciskato believes EvenUp makes it easier for adjusters to calculate their first offer and move cases toward settlement.
The reduction in drafting time, combined with automated record review, has helped the firm settle some MVA cases within four months, rather than its typical eight months to a year.
These faster turnaround times not only increase the firm’s cash flow but have made it a more attractive referral partner.
When we can turn around cases faster with EvenUp, our referral partners are more inclined to refer our firm new business.
Brian Franciskato
Before EvenUp, verifying case details required Cryderman to use Adobe’s OCR or manually reread the documents. Adobe’s OCR, she says, couldn’t find everything since it was unable to read handwritten notes. Reviewing these records herself added hours, if not days, to her workload.
Now, Cryderman uses Companion™, EvenUp’s AI assistant, for every stage of a case, from when records are first uploaded to when she is drafting discovery responses.
When records are uploaded, Cryderman uses Companion™ to quickly understand the key facts of a case, helping her provide more informed updates when clients call.
Companion makes us certainly look better to clients.
Amanda Cryderman
Cryderman has also experimented with using Companion™ to help her create plaintiff profile forms and fact sheets for the firm’s mass tort clients. While the firm has yet to take on a new mass tort with EvenUp, it anticipates it will save the firm a significant amount of time. Each form can require upwards of 30 pages of information and take hours to complete. With roughly 100 clients in a given mass tort case, completing these forms could take weeks.
Now, Cryderman can use Companion™ to quickly search for key phrases among hundreds of records. She has also begun using AI Drafts’ Mirror Mode to draft the plaintiff profile forms and fact sheets, which she anticipates will help her in the future as the firm expands its mass torts practice.
I particularly love EvenUp’s Mirror Mode to create the specific discovery responses that are required in mass torts, such as plaintiff’s fact sheets or plaintiff profile forms. I can upload those in Word, and it will generate responses that would normally take me hours to complete.
Amanda Cryderman
Together, Companion™ and Mirror Mode have decreased the time to create the profile forms and fact sheets from 1-2 weeks to 1-2 hours.
Nash & Franciskato anticipates that with EvenUp, they will be able to significantly scale their mass torts practice.
Nash & Franciskato found EvenUp’s onboarding process smooth and intuitive, with staff able to start using EvenUp immediately.
I thought the onboarding experience with EvenUp was incredibly easy. By the end of [a roughly one-hour] meeting, I was able to immediately go into the platform and start utilizing it."
Amanda Cryderman
EvenUp’s responsiveness also contributed to the firm’s positive experience. Cryderman says she has never emailed the team without receiving a response within 24 hours.
Since adopting EvenUp in the firm’s existing workflows, Nash & Franciskato has seen the following results:
The firm has already recommended EvenUp to other law firms, including a high-volume workers’ compensation firm that adopted EvenUp on Franciskato’s recommendation.
I would definitely recommend EvenUp to all of my colleagues.
Brian Franciskato
