MyCase Customer Spotlight: Mindi Wells

At MyCase, our customers are the heart of what we do. It’s their feedback and support that continues to shape our business for a better future. That’s why we take every opportunity to gather real customer insights and learn how MyCase has helped law practices improve their processes and take their firms to the next level.

Most recently, we spoke to Mindi Wells, Founder and Managing Attorney of Wells Law, who has found success with MyCase by saving time and resources on collections, communication with clients, and so much more.

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. Can you tell us a little about yourself—how you ended up becoming a lawyer, what you enjoy about practicing law, and how you ended up at this law firm?

I’ve been an attorney for about 23 years.

Early on in my career, I started out leading a human resources office. My background prior to going to law school was in human resources and working as a student in workers’ compensation and business-related law firms.

So I jokingly say I’m a business person first and foremost. I think like a business person, but have a really solid understanding of the law that applies to those areas as well. When I decided to open my own practice, I found that there was a huge need among small and medium-sized businesses to have someone with my skill set—someone who not only understood the law, but also understood business implications, business objectives, bottom line, and could talk to them in business lingo, not just legal jargon. So I jokingly say that the work that I do is to bring this legal perspective, but I’m there to help that business move forward and get their objectives accomplished.

That’s great. Let’s talk about your firm, which you started in 2017. Tell me a little bit about its size, location, and practice areas.

So we are a small team. I’m the primary attorney partner and managing attorney. I handle largely anything related to employment, law, HR issues, workplace investigations, and training. Building upon my background in HR and organizational leadership, I focus my work on transactional issues related to employment law and HR. And then I have a team of other attorneys that we call in as necessary when those business clients have other needs.

We are licensed in Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Nevada. An attorney on our team is licensed in each one of those states and I’m licensed in Ohio and Florida. We are based in Ohio, but we have always been set up as a remote-based firm. So we do not maintain a brick and mortar location.

That virtual practice must’ve come in pretty handy when COVID hit.

Absolutely. There was absolutely zero change in how we do business and how we deliver our services to our clients. We have always been set up since the day we opened with MyCase, which gives our clients all the access they need 24/7. We were already set up for video conferencing. We leveraged all the technology available to us right from the start.

I was a solo practitioner, so it was important that I surrounded myself with tools that made my life easier— tools that took administrative things off my plate so I could really focus on providing the legal services and not on the business and support delivery side.

When COVID hit, it did not change how we deliver services. It did not change our business model. What it did do was escalate the role of our business because our clients are all small and middle-sized businesses and every single one of them was impacted by COVID.  Our workload increased dramatically, but how we do our work didn’t change. We were already prepared and it was a seamless time for us when it came to the delivery of our services because of MyCase and how we work.

Well, that’s fantastic. It sounds like your technology investment upfront really paid off in the long run. SinceMyCase is an important part of your tech stack, let’s talk a little bit about MyCase and why you chose it.

When I opened  up my own firm I had to go out and start exploring some tools on my own, and another attorney in town recommended MyCase. So I considered MyCase along with two other solutions. I did the trial runs and I did the one-on-ones with a customer support person.

I really didn’t know how or what I was going to need, but I really liked MyCase’s ease of use and everything that I had seen from the support person was fantastic.

The number one factor for me was that I didn’t  have to subscribe to both a case management service and a payment service. At the time, the other two solutions I was considering required you to sign on with the case management solution and then sign on with a second provider for the payment services. I really liked that MyCase made it super easy and the billing and payments were already built into MyCase. I was a one-stop shop for literally every kind of tool.

MyCase really does manage all aspects of the client lifecycle. It’s easy for us to teach anyone else who comes on board how to use it. And so far, the client feedback has been phenomenal. They are busy business owners. They want tools and resources that are easy to navigate and get them what they want when they want it without much difficulty. And we get a lot of positive feedback on MyCase, so we’ve stuck with it.

I love that your clients find that it helps you provide them with the best possible service. That’s wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit about why you chose cloud-based software?

Sure. I knew that I wasn’t going to have a brick and mortar location at the start and because I was a solo, I knew that folks needed to be able to access their materials remotely, and I knew that I wanted to be a paperless practice right from the start.The cloud-based solution just made sense. There was never any consideration of doing anything except a cloud-based service, right from the start.

Well, that’s the benefit of the cloud, I’m glad it’s paying off for you. Can you tell me a little bit about how MyCase has helped you run your practice more efficiently?

MyCase allows those of us who are attorneys to really focus on being the attorney and providing the subject matter expertise and not having to do a lot of administrative work. We’re also not having to delegate that to other administrative support staff. We can do it right in the system and it generates a lot of the workflows and things like that just work for us. Billing and generating our invoices takes no time at all, whereas at the previous firm I worked at our office manager spent a significant chunk of time getting everything out to the attorneys to review billables, editing the billables, generating the bills, and waiting for payment.

It takes me minutes in MyCase to generate our bills and we have a 100% payment rate. MyCase gets our bills paid and we don’t ever have to do collections as the bills get generated. The percentage of our clients who pay within 48 hours has to be well over 90% because it is just so easy for them to pay right there when they get the invoice using  their credit card or ACH. And they never have to think about it again.MyCasealso allows us to centralize  everything so that the attorneys who might pick up one of our clients can see all the history in the file. You don’t have to go looking for it. It’s all right in one place—the messages, the documents, the drafts, communications, and telephone numbers, which saves all of us time.

How would you say MyCase has helped you run your practice more efficiently? I know you touched on that a little bit, but are there any other ways that it does that?

MyCase forces you to think through your processes because whenever you want to use an automated solution to make your life easier, you must first tell it what you want it to accomplish,because the software can only do what you tell it to do.

So I’m a big fan of making sure that I have checklists and a structure in place. I’ve thought through my processes and then built MyCase to emulate those processes for us. It definitely makes us more efficient in how we deliver service, and much more intentional, thoughtful, and methodic in how we do many of the administrative functions.

I think the other thing that has helped us is just having cleaner data, too.In MyCase, we have standardized billing codes when everyone’s putting something in. So our messaging, our data, and our delivery of everything that goes out the door looks really clean and consistent and looks very high-quality and professional. MyCase allows us to present a very professional and high level of service to our clients that might have normally been way out of reach for a small practitioner.

I love to hear that.  Are there any other things about MyCase that you really like

One of the things that I applaud MyCase for is constantly developing and implementing new tools and improving features and enhancements that make our lives easier or provide greater service to our clients.The entire time I’ve been with MyCase, they are a constantly evolving organization providing tools that definitely do both of those things. The e-signature function is a great example. Having document automation is another great example. And the app for me as a user is fantastic. It makes entering my time really quick and easy, as well as responding to messages from clients through the app.

Well, thanks so much. That’s high praise. So I can assume you’ve recommended MyCase to other lawyers?

Without a doubt. Any chance I get to provide feedback, I do. If attorneys are evaluating different solutions or even beginning to think about some kind of case management solution or client management tool, I always recommend MyCase.

I know we were able to eliminate at least three different tools once MyCase added new services and new modules.

So I always tell attorneys to think about everything that they’re spending outside of their case management solution, and then see if MyCase is already doing that since they may be able to eliminate some of those other subscription services, and reduce their overhead even more with this tool.

So in terms of those subscriptions that you eliminated, how much would you say that saves you each month? 

Between the document automation software, and w not having to pay extra forbilling software,I’m guessing MyCase probably saving us somewhere in the neighborhood of 40K to 50K a month compared to some of the other software solutions that we either considered at some point or knew we needed to needed to buy, but kept doing the manually at the time.

That’s great to hear as well. And finally,  what do you hope to accomplish with your firm over the next five years or so?

I love what we’re doing right now. We are not looking to build an empire. So unlike others who might be saying they’re growing a practice, I want to continue to do work that I love with clients that I really enjoy and help these businesses stay open, stay afloat, and stay in compliance.

I’m really excited to say that all of our clients remained open, even during COVID. And so I think there’s hope that five years from now, we’re still doing the kind of work that we’re getting to do today—hopefully in even more efficient ways. And I’m hoping I’m on the cutting edge of whatever new technologies may be around in five years.

I wish you the best of luck with that. And I hope that MyCase will help you reach those goals. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.