Gabriel Stiritz
I'm building the referral infrastructure for plaintiff law.
Most law firms still manage referrals on spreadsheets—no visibility into case outcomes, no partner performance data, no systematic placement decisions. At Sanford Law Firm, we were leaving seven figures on the table from referral relationships we couldn't track.
So I built Lexamica. We're replacing relationship-based referrals with infrastructure that treats them as measurable business operations.
What I'm Building
The US personal injury market moves $8.4 billion through referrals annually. Almost none of it flows through modern infrastructure.
Lexamica is the first platform that gives law firms real visibility into their referral networks—case tracking, partner performance analytics, automated compliance, B2B payments.
Why this matters:
The old model—where every firm tries to do marketing, intake, case management, and litigation—is breaking. Marketing costs are unsustainable. AI is automating the commodity work. The future belongs to specialized firms that focus on what they do best, connected by infrastructure that makes collaboration efficient.
We're building that infrastructure.
What I've Built
I started in nonprofit operations, running development for an organization doing youth mentorship in underserved communities. When we decided to expand beyond one city, I moved into operations to build the infrastructure that could support that growth.
Over six years, we went from one location to three cities across two states. Revenue tripled from $1.1M to $3.5M. The team grew from 65 to 150 people. I built donor CRM systems managing millions in annual fundraising, implemented multi-state HR and accounting infrastructure, and created cloud-based operations that let us coordinate across distributed locations.
That's where I learned the fundamental lesson: scaling operations isn't about adding complexity. It's about building systems that get out of the way and let people do their best work. Good operations are invisible.
I left nonprofits in 2020 to become CFO and Integrator at Sanford Law Firm, a plaintiff employment practice handling wage and hour cases. When I joined, they were managing a few hundred cases. The opportunity was clear—build operational infrastructure that could scale this to a national practice.
Over three years, we became the largest plaintiff wage and hour firm in the country. We filed 400+ federal cases annually, managed 20,000 active clients, recovered over $40M for workers who'd been cheated by their employers.
The technical challenge was building systems that could handle that volume. I built a custom Salesforce platform managing everything from intake through settlement. Automated PACER tracking across 400 simultaneous federal cases—you can't manually monitor that many dockets. Cloud infrastructure integrating Google Workspace, Clio, and custom tools to enable distributed operations across the entire case lifecycle. The systems had to support not just individual cases but complex class actions, collective actions, and mass arbitrations.
But the real problem emerged in our referral network. We were sending hundreds of cases to partner firms across the country—cases we couldn't handle in-house because of jurisdiction, practice area, or capacity constraints. And we had zero visibility into what happened after the referral. No way to track outcomes. No data to evaluate which partners were actually delivering value. No systematic approach to placement decisions.
We were leaving seven figures on the table from referral relationships we couldn't measure or manage.
That operational gap became Lexamica. Because if we had this problem at one of the most sophisticated plaintiff practices in the country, every other firm had it worse.
How I Think
I build operational infrastructure that enables scale.
That means:
- •Systems designed around actual workflows, not theoretical ones
- •Data-driven decisions instead of relationships and intuition
- •Automation for repetitive work so people focus on judgment
- •Transparency where none existed before
In legal services specifically, most technology tries to replace lawyers. I build infrastructure that makes lawyers more effective—better data for decisions, better tools for collaboration, better economics for specialization.
What Drives This
Core Values:
Drive change through urgency.
Don't wait for permission or perfect conditions. If something's broken, fix it now. The cost of delay is usually higher than the cost of imperfect action.
Humble expertise.
Know your domain better than anyone else, but don't make it about you. The goal is solving the problem, not proving you're the smartest person in the room.
Open conflict beats fake harmony.
If you disagree, say it directly. Passive-aggressive "alignment" wastes time and produces worse outcomes. The best teams argue openly and move forward decisively.
Communicate problems first.
Don't wait until you have the solution. Flag issues immediately when you see them. Hiding problems until you can fix them yourself is how small issues become disasters.
Own everything you can.
Take responsibility for outcomes, not just your specific task. If something fails because you didn't speak up or step in, that's on you too.
Understand before acting.
Curiosity isn't optional. Ask why things work the way they do. Challenge assumptions. Then act decisively based on what you learned.
My Library:
Books that shaped how I think about operations and building companies:
- Traction by Gino Wickman - The EOS framework for actually running a company
- Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull - Building creative organizations that scale
- High Output Management by Andy Grove - Operational discipline and leverage
- Scaling Up by Verne Harnish - Growing beyond the entrepreneurial phase
- Small Giants by Bo Burlingham - Companies that choose to be great instead of big
- The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack - Open-book management and accountability
- The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni - Organizational health as competitive advantage
- The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker - Fundamentals of getting the right things done
- Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Building systems that gain from disorder