The Intake System That Turned a 2-Person PI Firm
Into One of the Best in the Country —

Glenn Lerner and Kevin Rowe started as a two-person operation with low overhead and the founders handling intake themselves. That model works at small scale. It suffocates at any other size. Today, Lerner & Rowe operates across 10 states with over 50 attorneys and 400 support staff — and none of that growth required the founders to touch every case decision. The reason is straightforward: they stopped treating intake as a founder responsibility and started treating it as a documented, auditable, repeatable system. Every intake script was written down. Every call was quality-checked. Case routing and assignment followed clear rules that any trained rep could execute. The intake process became infrastructure — and infrastructure scales in a way that founder judgment never can.

This video breaks down exactly how that transition happened and what it means for any PI firm trying to grow past the point where the founder is the bottleneck. Most plaintiff firms hit a hard ceiling around $20 million in annual revenue — not because the market dried up, but because every qualified case still routes to the founder for final approval. The more cases come in, the more founder time they consume. Growth becomes a time management crisis instead of a systems problem, and that’s where firms stop. Lerner & Rowe broke that pattern by building an intake operation where the founder’s judgment lives in case strategy — not in filtering, routing, or distribution. Earlier this year they layered in AI process improvements that cut case progression by up to three months across a multi-state operation. The video covers what that model looks like from the ground up — and why you don’t need 50 attorneys to start building it. You need one intake script, one quality audit, and one clear case assignment rule.