Priorities in build
Document collection is moving. The other nine are specified, owned, and waiting on a start date.
Phase 1 diagnostic complete · implementation not yet shipped
Law Offices of Robert M. Geller, P.A. · Prepared by Iron Noodle · Updated July 27, 2026
Step 03 — The Plan · Profit Blueprint
Implementation Plan — Turning the Audit Into Operating Control
The week-by-week roadmap: named owners, a sequenced retirement order for the legacy stack, and the recoverable dollars behind each move. (Diagnostic findings live in the Blueprint; this document is the execution plan.)
A profitable, high-volume firm carrying too much manual control drag. Nothing here is about fixing revenue — it is about keeping what the firm already earns.
Current position: Document collection is in build with an August 1 go-live for new hires. Two retirement steps in the original plan have been re-sequenced after July discovery — collections still runs on Four Eyes, and billing still runs on Keep. The 341 group inbox, the department’s first ask on May 18, is still not built. Everything else in the roadmap remains specified and unstarted.
1,072
Bankruptcy clients hired but never filed — 35.3% of BK hires, roughly $2.32M sitting in the pipeline at the $2,161 average case value.
$868K–$1.61M
Recoverable revenue and cost savings targeted within 12 months across eleven findings. No new hires required.
Systems in play
- Document collection
- Zoho CRM
- Zoho Desk — calls
- Practice Panther
- Four Eyes
- Keep / Infusionsoft
- Best Case
- SharePoint
- LawPay
- Call tracking
Ten systems, roughly $98K a year, and dozens of spreadsheets holding the joins between them. The plan consolidates the stack — but only in an order that never leaves a live money process without a home.
Watch First
The findings in a hundred seconds
The diagnosis this plan acts on, in short form. If you are picking this up cold, start here — the rest of the page is the execution detail behind it.
01 — Where We Are
Three things changed since this plan was written
Seven operations calls and a recorded 341 department walkthrough since the plan was first delivered. Two of the three changes affect sequencing, which means they affect what is safe to build next.
Document collection
In build, with an August 1 go-live for new hires. Teams are organized alphabetically by client surname, matching how the firm already routes work. Separately, escalations fell from 28 a month to roughly 4 after the end-of-day message-check mandate — useful proof that enforcement from the top works here.
Two retirements were wrong
The original plan retired Four Eyes in Week 3 and Keep at Week 8. Collections still runs on Four Eyes. Billing’s auto-debit feed and the manager hire report still run on Keep. Retiring either on the original schedule breaks a live money process. Both now carry explicit prerequisites.
The #1 gap is still open
The 341 group inbox does not exist. It was the department head’s first ask on May 18 and was still open at the July 20 walkthrough. Court notices land in one person’s personal inbox and are re-forwarded by hand. A missed forward is a missed 341 meeting.
On the assignment lists circulated July 27. The alphabetical routing for the 341 department, Chapter 7 cases, billing, and collection-violation attorneys is the right structure — it is what the department already does by hand. The risk is where it lives. That logic now sits in at least three places: the circulated list, the intake team’s personal document, and the client-service county and case-type sheet. Three copies of the same routing rules drift apart. It belongs in one assignment engine inside the CRM, where a reassignment is a settings change instead of a re-circulated email.
02 — The Numbers
Twelve months ended March 31, 2026
Every figure below comes from your P&L, your case management system, or your staff’s own words.
The operating picture
- Total income
- $7,783,024
- Net operating income
- $1,633,818
- Margin
- 20.9%
- Bankruptcy clients hired
- 3,035
- Cases filed
- 1,963
- Hired but never filed
- 1,072 · 35.3%
- Value sitting in pipeline
- $2,316,592
- Recoverable at 20–40%
- $463K–$927K
Population note: bankruptcy-only on both sides of the pipeline calculation. The 73 family-law hires are excluded, because a family-law matter does not produce a bankruptcy filing — comparing total hires against BK filings would overstate the leak. An earlier version of this page used the wider figure; these are the corrected numbers.
03 — Progress
Where each workstream actually stands
Status is claimed against evidence, not intent. Nothing is marked live unless the firm is using it in production today.
●
Live
The firm is using it in production today, verifiable from your side.
●
In build
Work has started, with something inspectable to show for it.
●
Spec ready
Specified in enough detail to build from. Not started.
●
Open
Identified and owned. No start date yet.
1 workstream in build, 8 open
Aug 1 go-live
2 sequencing prerequisites
WorkstreamLiveBuildSpecOpenProgress
Client-facing
Document collection
Account provisioned · alphabetical teams · Ch7/Ch13 document lists
- Demo delivered and well received
- Zoho “hired” trigger → account creation
- Intake team training
33%
341 department
~200 filings a month, 4 staff, 30-step manual daily list
- 341@ group mailbox — not built
- Notice → case auto-match + review queue
- PACER lane for Northern/Southern districts
0%
Intake & scheduling
2019 PDF intake form still in use · calendar cherry-picking
- Field-by-field rebuild spec delivered
- Zoho Forms build · Zoho Bookings round-robin
20%
Back office
Stack consolidation
Four Eyes and Keep retirement — both re-sequenced
- Rehome collections tagging first
- Move billing feed + hire report off Keep
0%
Billing & finance
7-tab billing document · bounce tracking · LawPay reconciliation
- Zoho Finance + LawPay sync and webhook
0%
Client service
10 spreadsheets · escalation log · foreclosure watch
- Migrate to Zoho Desk + dashboards
0%
Reporting & dashboards
Cross-system reporting bridge · call intelligence · SLA timers
- Carries court and trustee data the CRM cannot
0%
Risk & governance
Single points of failure
Combined intake/retains/billing role · undocumented migration · unowned conflict check
- Family-law conflict check — no owner
- Build documentation and decision log
0%
Adoption
Named repeatedly as the biggest blocker — ahead of any tooling question
- Per-department training, floor champions, usage visibility
0%
Percentages describe checklist items verified, not confidence. A workstream at 0% is not stalled — most are specified in detail and waiting on a start date and an owner with time to give them.
04 — Roadmap
The deployment sequence
Order matters more than speed. Two stages below exist purely to keep a live money process from losing its home mid-migration.
1
Document collectionGo-live for new hires By August 1 In build
Every new hire lands in one place with a known document list, and nobody has to ask a client twice for something they already sent.
Blocking Three things must land together: the CRM “hired” trigger, the Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 document lists, and the alphabetical teams tested against a dummy client.
- Demo delivered and well received
- Alphabetical team model agreed
- CRM “hired” trigger sends name, email, chapter type
- Ch7 / Ch13 default document lists
- Dummy client run end to end
- Intake team training
2
341 departmentCourt notices stop depending on one inbox Weeks 1–4 Open
Court notices arrive in a monitored queue and match themselves to cases, instead of being forwarded by hand and tracked in colour-coded cells.
First The 341@ group mailbox has to exist. It sits in the firm’s mail tenant, not ours — which is the likeliest reason it has gone unbuilt since May.
- Create the 341@ group mailbox
- Point court notices at it
- Notice → case auto-match on case number and name
- Review-status queue for ambiguous matches
- PACER retrieval lane
- Automated 341 reminders
Northern and Southern district cases generate no court email at all and are pulled manually today. Any notice automation needs a PACER lane, not just an inbox. The daily review design was agreed on the July 20 call, with the department head as reviewer — she receives the notices regardless.
3
Rehome before retiringThe two sequencing prerequisites Weeks 2–6 Prerequisite
Nothing gets switched off until the work it still carries has somewhere else to live.
Why The original plan retired both systems on a date. July discovery found each still running a live money process.
- Four Eyes: rehome collections tagging into the CRM, verify in production, then retire both versions
- Keep: move billing’s new-hire and auto-debit feed into the CRM
- Keep: build an accurate hire-tracking report to replace the manager’s pulled spreadsheet
Savings of roughly $8K a year on Four Eyes and $12K on Keep are real, but they are realized after the rehome, not before it. Retiring on the original schedule would have broken collections tagging and billing’s auto-debit in the same quarter.
4
Intake, signature & schedulingThe front door Weeks 2–4 Spec ready
One retain record drives the contract, the payment setup, the onboarding checklist, and the folder — instead of six people re-keying the same client.
- Zoho Sign — 3 BK contract templates, field mapping, approval chains
- Zoho Forms intake rebuild — conditional logic by case type, chapter, employment
- Zoho Bookings — round-robin, no calendar override
- Auto-folder creation on hire
The intake form in use today is a PDF last updated in 2019. A field-by-field rebuild specification was delivered July 13 — the build has not started. Intake approves the interface before staff rollout.
5
Spreadsheets & reportingRetire the shadow systems Weeks 3–10 Open
The joins between systems stop living in one person’s private file.
- 10 client-service spreadsheets → Desk + dashboards
- 7-tab billing document → Finance + LawPay sync
- Bounce tracking → auto-reports from payment webhook
- Filing tracker + post-filing spreadsheets
- Reporting bridge — court and trustee data
- Call intelligence and escalation SLA timers
Rule No spreadsheet is retired until its replacement has an owner, required fields, reporting output, and staff acceptance.
6
One assignment engineConsolidate the routing logic Weeks 9–10 Open
Case routing becomes a settings change instead of an email, and stops depending on who is in the office.
Three private files currently hold the same routing rules: the alphabetical assignment lists circulated July 27, the intake team’s personal document, and the client-service county and case-type sheet. They will drift. Merging them into CRM assignment rules removes a named single point of failure and makes rebalancing a two-minute job.
- Merge surname, county, and case-type logic into one rule set
- Retire the private copies
7
Recovery & coverageOnly after the upstream works Weeks 4–12 Open
Go back for the 1,072 clients who hired and never filed — but not before the systems that lost them are fixed.
- After-hours and overflow phone coverage
- Pipeline recovery campaign against the unfiled cohort
- Texting consolidation — one thread per client
- Second-course tracking automation
Recovering even 20% of the unfiled pipeline is roughly $463K with no additional advertising spend. Running the campaign before document collection and intake are fixed would push clients back into the same bottleneck that stalled them the first time.
05 — Next 30 Days
What happens between now and the end of August
One hard date, two prerequisites, and a decision that has been open since May.
August at a glance
Jul 28Aug 4Aug 11Aug 18Aug 25Sep 1Sep 8Sep 15
Aug 1 — go-liveAug 8 — training completeAug 29 — sequencing clear
The August 1 date is the only fixed commitment on this page. Everything after it is sequence, not schedule — dates firm up once the weekly cadence has an owner.
| By when | What happens | Who |
|---|---|---|
| August 1 | Document collection goes live for new hires. Requires the CRM “hired” trigger sending name, email and chapter type; the Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 document lists; and the alphabetical teams built and tested against a dummy client. | Dave, Selene, Iron Noodle |
| Week of Aug 4 | Intake team training on walking clients through upload and the help feature. Adoption is the constraint here, not the software. | Angie, Selene |
| August | Create the 341@ group mailbox and point court notices at it. Unblocks notice parsing, the signing report, and 341 calendaring — three items that cannot start without it. | Firm IT |
| August | Rehome collections tagging out of Four Eyes, and move billing’s auto-debit feed and the manager hire report off Keep. Both are prerequisites to retirement, and both are live money processes. | Dave |
| August | Consolidate the alphabetical assignment lists into one CRM assignment engine, so routing changes are a settings change rather than a re-circulated email. | Dave, Iron Noodle specifies |
| Ongoing | Weekly build review, staff validation, and executive scorecard. Start the build documentation and decision log. | Roberto + Dave |
| Decision | Name an owner for the family-law conflict check. There is no systematic check today and no one owns it. | Robert + Helene |
06 — Owners
Every open item, and whose desk it sits on
Grouped by who has to move first. An item with no owner is not a plan — it is a wish, and it is why several of these have not moved since May.
| Owner | Item | Target | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iron Noodle | |||
| Iron Noodle | Document collection rollout — teams, document lists, client access, questionnaire | Aug 1 | In build |
| Iron Noodle | Court-notice to case auto-match, review-status queue, and PACER retrieval lane | Wk 2–4 | Open |
| Iron Noodle | Reporting bridge — call tracking, CRM and invoicing consolidated for court and trustee data | Wk 5–6 | Open |
| Iron Noodle | After-hours and overflow phone coverage | Wk 4 | Open |
| Iron Noodle | Pipeline recovery campaign against the unfiled cohort | Wk 10+ | Open |
| Dave — Zoho build | |||
| Dave | CRM “hired” trigger into document collection — name, email, chapter type | Aug 1 | Blocking |
| Dave | Rehome collections tagging before either Four Eyes version is retired | Wk 2–3 | Prerequisite |
| Dave | Move billing’s new-hire and auto-debit feed plus the manager hire report off Keep | Wk 4–6 | Prerequisite |
| Dave | Zoho Sign — 3 BK contract templates, field mapping, approval chains | Wk 2 | Open |
| Dave | Zoho Forms intake rebuild — specification delivered July 13 | Wk 3 | Spec ready |
| Dave | Zoho Bookings — round-robin scheduling, no calendar override | Wk 3 | Open |
| Dave | 10 client-service spreadsheets to Desk and dashboards | Wk 3–4 | Open |
| Dave | Billing document to Finance, with payment reconciliation and bounce webhook | Wk 5–6 | Open |
| Dave | Consolidate three copies of routing logic into one assignment engine | Wk 9–10 | Open |
| Firm — staff and IT | |||
| Firm IT | Create the 341@ group mailbox. Still open since May 18. Sits in your mail tenant, not ours. | Wk 1 | #1 gap |
| Selene | Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 document lists, alphabetical teams, dummy-client test | Aug 1 | Blocking |
| Angie | Intake-team training on the upload and help workflow | Aug 8 | Open |
| Fer | 341 workflow protocol document — outstanding since May 18 | — | Open |
| Escobar | Written step-by-step billing process document — already prepared, needs sending | — | Open |
| Robert & Helene — decisions only you can make | |||
| Robert + Helene | Name an owner for the family-law conflict check. No systematic check exists today. This is liability exposure, not efficiency. | — | Risk |
| Robert + Helene | Split the combined intake, retains and billing role — three departments depend on one person | — | Risk |
| Robert + Helene | Protect the 341 department head’s time — she was reassigned for a full week while the department carried roughly 200 filings a month with 4 staff | — | Risk |
| Joint | Zoho build documentation and decision log — no written record exists of what has been migrated or configured | Ongoing | Open |
07 — Decisions
Four things only you can decide
Each one blocks work that is otherwise ready to move. None of them require a budget conversation.
-
1
Who owns the conflict check?
Family law has no systematic conflict check and no named owner. Every other item on this page is an efficiency question. This one is a liability question, and it is the only item we would escalate ahead of the August go-live.
Unblocks: family-law operations lane
-
2
Who creates the 341@ mailbox?
It was the department’s first ask on May 18 and it is still open. The plan originally assigned it to us, which was wrong — creating a mailbox in your mail tenant is a firm IT task. That mis-assignment is the likeliest reason nobody picked it up.
Unblocks: notice parsing, signing report, 341 calendaring
-
3
Is the 341 head’s time protected?
She was pulled onto intake training for a full week while her department carried roughly 200 filings a month with four staff. Automating a department whose lead keeps getting reassigned will not stick, no matter how good the tooling is.
Unblocks: durable 341 automation
-
4
Who runs the weekly cadence?
Build review, staff validation, and an executive scorecard were designed into this plan and never staffed. Without someone holding the dependency map across two vendors, sequencing errors like the Four Eyes and Keep retirements reach production instead of getting caught in review.
Unblocks: everything downstream of Stage 3
Three of these four cost nothing but a decision. The fourth is the difference between a plan that ships and a plan that gets read.
08 — Governance
How this stays on the rails
Two vendors, eleven departments, and a live practice that cannot pause. The operating rhythm matters as much as the build order.
Monday — build review
What shipped last week, what is blocked, and which workflow is next. Sequencing decisions get made here, not mid-build.
Wednesday — staff validation
The department lead tests the workflow. Required fields and exceptions get corrected. Training gaps get logged before rollout, not after.
Friday — executive scorecard
Progress against the 30-60-90 goals, open decisions for Robert and Helene, and next week’s owner list locked.
Written decision log
Every migration and configuration choice recorded. Today that knowledge lives with one contractor and nowhere else — a named single point of failure.
Source-of-truth rule
One system owns each fact
Where two systems disagree, one is named authoritative and the other reads from it. Most of the reconciliation work in this firm exists because that call was never made.
Retirement rule
Nothing dies without a successor
No spreadsheet or system is retired until its replacement has an owner, required fields, reporting output, and staff acceptance. The Four Eyes and Keep corrections on this page are what happens when that rule is applied late.
Adoption, not software, is the binding constraint. The escalation numbers prove the firm can change fast when leadership enforces it.
09 — Impact
Total annual impact
Across eleven findings, within twelve months, with no additional headcount.
Where the inefficiency actually lives
The drag is not one broken system. It is twenty-five spreadsheets holding the joins between ten systems, and the copy-paste labour required to keep them agreeing with each other.
25+ spreadsheets run this operation, in every department. Maintaining them costs 15–20 hours a week — roughly $40K–$60K a year in labour, before counting a single re-keying error.
| Department | Owner | What is being tracked by hand |
|---|---|---|
| Finance | Helene | 7-tab billing document — cash, checks, refunds, chargebacks, bounces, payment processor. CFO-level data in a document with no audit trail. |
| Billing | Angie, Escobar | Master multi-tab sheet: bounce list, ACH bounces, new and posted auto-debits, 1yr+ non-payers, cancellations, chargebacks, refunds, cash/check, online payments, weekend coverage. Every tab fed by copy-paste from the payment processor, the legacy CRM, and the signing report. Bounces are called daily off this sheet. |
| Client service | Valeria Beltrán | 10+ spreadsheets — incident log, discharge notifications, coverage, attendance, texts, faxes, escalations, foreclosure watch, call performance, coaching. Six were walked live on July 14. The foreclosure watch and the 48-hour escalation log are both time-sensitive. |
| Post-filing | Betty Jo | Signature pages, payment reporting, reviews, new hires, discharge tracking, 341 scheduling. Six-plus spreadsheets carried by one person. |
| Post-filing | Sarah Broom | Hearing calendars and amendment tracking, managed by hand across every attorney’s schedule. |
| Legal | Selene | Monthly filing tracker, unfiled cases, rescheduling reasons. Bonus calculations depend on data hand-entered out of the bankruptcy software. |
| Intake | Ana Guerrero | Sticky notes plus a personal document for paralegal and attorney lookup. If she is out, nobody knows the routing. |
| Phones | Anna Barajas | Daily retains, hires by team member, cancellations and rehires — counted by hand each day. |
| Marketing | Chris Garcia | Hires and conversion reporting, assembled manually every week. |
| HR | Chris, Danielle | Employee tracking, kept in a chat channel as a backup to the legacy CRM. |
The copy-paste tax on every new client
- Contract fill
- 2–5 min
- Case management profile
- 3–5 min
- Document folder
- 2–3 min
- Bankruptcy software folder
- 3–5 min
- Paralegal appointment
- 2–3 min
- Per client, total
- 12–21 min
- Across 3,109 hires
- 620–1,087 hrs/yr
- Systems touched
- 5, by hand
The same information is typed five times, then typed again. Social security numbers and contact details are hand-copied into the bankruptcy software. The billing tabs are hand-copied from three separate sources. In the 341 department, each court notice means opening the case file, checking it against that trustee’s checklist, then hand-keying the case number, hearing date and time, attorney and paralegal into a shared sheet — up to 30 minutes per client, with a backlog that runs 20 to 30 deep. And at pre-signing the firm re-collects overlapping information it already captured at intake, because nothing carried it forward.
The cost is not really the typing. It is that no two sources agree, so leadership gets conflicting numbers depending on which sheet was opened. It is that a missed line in the signing report is a missed 341 meeting. It is that four of these are single points of failure — if one person leaves, the process leaves with them, because it was never written down anywhere else. Robert’s own instruction on the discovery call was direct: “I want them gone.”
$868,000 low $1,612,000 high 11 findings
Recoverable revenue and cost savings. Ranges are deliberate — the low end assumes only the pipeline and consolidation work lands. Spreadsheet elimination alone accounts for $150K–$250K of it.Delivery and payment trigger
Delivery of this plan, together with the Blueprint findings and recommendations, completes the Phase 1 findings-and-plan milestone. Per the accepted Phase 1 structure, the second $5,000 installment is due upon delivery.
Phase 2 implementation remains deliverables-based and is scoped after review, not to exceed $50,000. Nothing is billed until a module is approved in writing.
Evidence base
Where this comes from
A five-day onsite audit (May 7–13, 2026), staff interviews across every department, five financial reports, and seven follow-up operations calls through July — including a recorded 341 department workflow walkthrough on July 20 that produced two of the corrections on this page.
Every status claim here is written against that record. Where an earlier version of this plan overstated a number or marked something live that was not, the correction is shown rather than quietly replaced.