How Franchi Law became lean and efficient in the face of new tort reform rules.
Drafting polished, accurate complaints in minutes with Filevine Document Assembly
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Year Founded: 2017
Location: Tampa, FL
Number of Staff: 3
Practice Areas: Personal Injury
Started using Filevine: 2019
Franchi Injury Law is a law firm in Tampa, Florida that specializes in personal injury, criminal law, and contract business litigation. The firm is led by William Franchi, an experienced civil and criminal trial attorney. Franchi Law has recovered millions of dollars for its clients, and has been recognized by Super Lawyers, Avvo, and The National Trial Lawyers.
The Challenge
A sudden legislative change makes traditional complaint drafting obsolete.
In 2023, Florida enacted a sweeping tort reform law that dramatically affects plaintiff-side firms. In addition to barring plaintiffs from recovery if the jury deems them over 50% responsible for their injuries, the law halves the statute of limitations for general negligence cases and cuts recovery amounts for medical expenses and attorney fees.
With very little forewarning, personal injury firms scrambled to file cases in the days before the law went into effect.
William Franchi, founder of Franchi Law, worked fast to protect the interests of his clients and the financial stability of his firm. Using Filevine Document Assembly, Franchi dramatically cut the time spent drafting high-quality complaints and went from filing 2 cases in a month to filing 70 in a week.
As soon as William started his own firm, he knew he wanted to use software to increase efficiency. He started using Filevine’s automatic document generation in 2019 to create accurate and high-quality legal documents more rapidly. “We’ve always been on the forefront of document automation. I feel like we used DocGen to the fullest we could,” says William.
To generate complaints, the firm used 10 different templates to cover their most common kinds of cases. The template used depended on case type, jurisdiction, whether there were single or multiple plaintiffs and defendants, whether there were employers involved, and other distinctions.
Using Filevine's Document Assembly clause library and conditionals, the firm is now able to generate all their complaints from a single template.
This new streamlined system has dramatically reduced the time it takes to draft a complaint and file a new case. Before Filevine's Document Assembly, William would have to search through case documents to pull out relevant information, find the right clauses to use, and manually input information. The process took an hour, on average.
Now it takes 5-7 minutes. With Filevine Document Assembly, an assistant can generate a complaint using the data and conditionals already inside Filevine. William simply has to review the document before it is eFiled.
