Former Morgan & Morgan product leader Shim Hirsh on personal injury law firm operations, intake conversion, and where AI pays off
For episode 100 of the Trial Lawyer View by Synergy podcast, I sat down with Shim Hirsh. Shim spent seven years as a product leader at Morgan & Morgan, a firm with 140 offices and more than 1,000 attorneys, reporting to the CTO and COO. Today he runs betterworks, where he builds AI systems for personal injury firms and ties every engagement to a measurable outcome.
His core message: a 25-person firm hits the same bottlenecks as Morgan & Morgan, on a smaller scale. And the fix is rarely more legal skill. “It’s not a law problem. It’s an operations problem. It’s a data problem.”
Here is what he wants every PI firm owner to know:
Technology: Case Management Systems
Shim breaks a case management system into two jobs:
- A source of truth for matter data: incident details, key dates, client information, other parties, and insurance coverage.
- An interaction layer where your team views the data and acts on the data.
In Shim’s experience, most CMS problems sit in the second job. Staff don’t see the right data, don’t capture the right data, or don’t act on what they see.
As a firm grows, teams fill the gap with spreadsheets. Take the pre-file checklist before a case moves to litigation. One paralegal handling 10 files a month tracks every missing item from memory. Three people handling 70 files a month build a spreadsheet. Now your firm has a second source of truth, and nobody outside the team knows why a case has sat in pre-lit for three months.
Shim calls this a shadow process, and a new platform won’t fix one. Your team brings the same habits to the new system. Switching also carries costs beyond licensing, build-out, and migration. People lose years of familiarity with the old interface and work slower on the new one. Shim has seen firms lose 10 to 15 percent of their staff during large migrations.
Before you shop for a new CMS, name the core problem.
Intake Conversion: Measure the Right Number
Say your firm gets 1,000 calls a month and signs 50 retainers. Good result or bad result? Without more data, you have no way to know.
- If 950 callers wanted a car insurance quote, you have a marketing problem. Your intake team signed 50 of 50 qualified leads.
- If 950 callers were injured in crashes and you signed 50, you have an intake problem.
Track every step of your intake pipeline in one place: qualification (statute of limitations, injury, jurisdiction, case type), retainer sent, follow-up, and signed. Then find the drop-off. Each data point leads to a different fix:
- A 15 to 20 percent abandon rate on hold means you need more people answering phones.
- A 10-click retainer process sent after the call gives prospects time to sign with the next firm on their list.
- Every second of delay on a web form gives the prospect time to call another lawyer.
One New York firm Shim advised converted fewer than 50 percent of callers. The loss cost the firm about $2.5 million in inventory value a year, roughly 25 percent of revenue. Shim paused the conversation and offered to drive to the office to fix intake first.
The Bottleneck After Intake
Shim says most firms handle intake well, because intake is easy to measure and plenty of software supports the process. The weak point comes after signing. He calls case opening “intake 2.0” and says firms should run the stage as a structured process: police reports, liability, coverage and declarations pages, and medical providers.
One firm took about 120 days to get a full picture of a case before moving to treatment. Those 120 days passed without a process for police reports or even first-party coverage.
Synergy sees the same pattern in healthcare lien work. Most firms still identify and verify healthcare recovery obligations with spreadsheets and staff memory. When those people leave, the knowledge leaves with them. When liens surface late, the firm chases invoices from years ago at settlement, and the client feels the delay.
Try Shim’s file test. Walk up to a case manager. Ask them to pull a random file and tell you where the case stands and what comes next. If they answer from memory instead of from the screen, you have found a bottleneck.
Where AI Helps Personal Injury Firms, and Where AI Fails
Shim is direct about the limits.
AI performs poorly at:
- Talking to clients. Shim says AI should never handle client conversations.
- Making case decisions without a human. He calls an autonomous AI case manager a mistake for the near future.
AI performs well at:
- Specific tasks with specific instructions, tools, and outputs. Example: pulling key facts from medical records and building a medical chronology.
The hard part is adoption. Shim calls the gap a “capability overhang.” Today’s models do far more than most organizations are set up to use. He pointed to MIT’s 2025 study on generative AI in business, which found 95 percent of organizations saw no measurable return on their AI spend. The study has critics, but the pattern matches what Shim sees inside PI firms.
The fix is operational. Put AI output inside your source of truth, where the output triggers action. A polished PDF sitting in an inbox or on a separate platform does nothing for your cases. “Any sort of technology lives or dies by its adoption into a business.”
Four Questions to Ask Any Legal Tech Vendor
Firms have three paths: build, buy, or embed. Building in-house requires a technology team fluent in your operations. Those people are expensive and hard to hire. Buying works for specifically identified processes that take up a lot of staff time, provided your team brings the output back into your system. Embedding AI inside your current stack is where Shim sees the best return.
After a great demo, ask these before you sign:
- Where do the inputs come from? Manual entry, or a bot prone to breaking every few weeks, signals trouble.
- Will the output adapt to your case types, jurisdictions, and business model?
- Where does the output live, and what will your team do with the results?
- What ROI have other clients seen, and how did they prove the numbers?
Shim says the last question often answers the first three. He also turns down ideas without a clear return. When a firm asked him to build a smart search feature, his answer was no ROI, no build.
The One Operations Change to Make Before the End of 2026
Asked what single change he would make across every PI firm, Shim pointed to a case inventory view built on three measures:
- Where your cases sit, by stage.
- Average days on desk, in total and per stage.
- Signed cases coming in versus resolved cases going out.
Put those three side by side and the bottleneck becomes visible. Cases accumulate at the stage where output falls behind input. Start there.
His view of the next year: AI works as infrastructure inside the tools you already use, not as a separate product. Intake staff focus on the caller while AI captures notes, fills fields, and sends the retainer. Case managers log in to a prioritized list of critical tasks for each case instead of fielding status calls.
“AI is not a solution. It’s a tool.”
Shim built betterworks to sell outcomes, not software. He estimates about 75 percent of his team’s time goes to system design: deciding where AI output goes, who sees the output, and what action follows.
What to Do This Week
- Run the file test with three case managers.
- Map your intake funnel step by step and find the largest drop-off.
- List every process living in a spreadsheet or someone’s head. Put healthcare lien identification on the list.
- Before you evaluate any AI tool, write down the outcome you expect and the number you expect to move.
🎧 Listen to the full podcast conversation on Trial Lawyer View here: https://partnerwithsynergy.com/podcast/shim-hirsh/
🔗 Want more insights like this?
If you’re a personal injury lawyer ready to scale, streamline, and step into your role as CEO, let’s talk. Join the Peak Practice Community, and learn how Synergy can help you eliminate settlement bottlenecks, resolve complex liens, and maximize recoveries. Learn more here: https://partnerwithsynergy.com/
If you want to grow and scale your law firm more effectively, consider partnering with Synergy for lien resolution. Learn more at: https://partnerwithsynergy.com/services/lien-resolution/why-partner-with-synergy/