"It just unlocked so many doors": How Garza Law scaled from 400 to 1,000 active cases in one year

At Garza Law Firm in Knoxville, Tennessee, the founding philosophy is short and non-negotiable. Marcos Garza, the firm's owner, repeats it to everyone on his team: no attorney in the building is the boss, and neither is he. The boss is the client. That belief shapes how the firm approaches Social Security Disability work. If a case has a chance, Garza Law takes it. If a client needs a fight, they fight.

"Our calling card is we're here to help. We just want to help as many people as we possibly can. So if we feel a case has a chance, we will take a chance on it and work with the client and give them every chance to get that approved."

It's a generous philosophy. It's also one that generates volume.

When Michael Bock joined the firm in 2024, he came from the construction industry, where contract management systems came with dashboards and real-time visibility as a matter of course. His first week at Garza Law, he asked where he could see all his cases at once. The answer surprised him. The team was working off shared SSA portal access, two-factor authentication via text message, and a queue of four or five staff members trying to log in at once. Authentication texts arrived at 4:30 in the morning when a hearing update posted. If too many login attempts failed, the account locked and someone had to call Social Security to restore access.

The deeper problem was informational. Cases the firm took on early (before an application was even filed) could sit in complete limbo for months. A client would call back to report that their intake call went fine, everything was "hunky-dory." Three months later, the team would discover the case had never been filed.

"The thing I lost sleep the most over was always cases where maybe we had scheduled a phone call for a client to file an application and they called us back and said, 'yeah, they had the phone call, everything was hunky-dory.' And then three months later we find out that the case was never actually filed because it was not technically eligible."

Meanwhile, mail piled up every morning. Paralegals sorted it, scanned each document, labeled the file, loaded it into Filevine, and assigned the appropriate task. And when the firm reached out with updates, clients would often respond: "Yeah, I got that two days ago."

The commitment to helping as many clients as possible was, paradoxically, producing the pressure that threatened it. At 400 active cases, the cracks in the manual model were no longer isolated friction points.

When Marcos Garza told Michael he wanted to start marketing the Social Security Disability practice, Michael's reaction was candid. He was "extremely hesitant." The firm's infrastructure couldn't carry that ambition. Staff were in a constant cycle of fact-finding and detective work trying to locate what had slipped before it got worse.

"The tipping point was at four hundred cases. Marcos (the owner) approached me and said, 'we've always done this organically, by word of mouth, and based on our reputation. But I'd like to start marketing social security disability.' That was kind of a crisis moment: we cannot scale the way that we are doing things. We've got paralegals that are pulling their hair out. We're in a constant problem solving, fact finding, detective mode of what's wrong here because something's fallen through the cracks, and it always takes four times as long to do something when things have slipped."

A recommendation from Devin DeVore, a fellow practitioner in Knoxville, pointed them toward Chronicle. That recommendation came at the right time. What Michael needed wasn't a product optimized for hearing preparation; the majority of Garza Law's cases are at initial and reconsideration, and most clients never reach a hearing. He needed full-lifecycle visibility. For clients, the calculus is simple.

Chronicle fit where the caseload actually lived. The majority of Garza Law's volume sits at initial and reconsideration, not hearing preparation, and Michael needed a platform built around that reality. He also needed it to work for paralegals at every case transition. "A lot of clients don't care about the hearing prep work we do. All they care about is their case gets approved." What mattered was visibility across the full lifecycle — from the moment a case came in to whatever stage it was sitting at.

That clarity made the decision easy. What came next surprised him.

Michael's technology contact was out of the office for a week, so rather than wait, he started the Filevine integration himself.

"From the point that we decided we wanted to move forward with it, it was just one white glove session with Nikhil and then we started linking things together. It probably took maybe forty-five minutes to link the phases, another forty-five minutes to map the fields. And that was really it."

A self-described "semi technically literate person" had connected Chronicle to the firm's case management system without his tech contact, in an afternoon. Once live, the change in how information moved through the practice was immediate. Documents that arrive in the ERE are now automatically loaded into Filevine. Staff no longer scan, label, and manually file what the SSA has already delivered digitally. Their job shifts to confirmation: yes, we have this, we already acted on it, shred it.

"Prior to using Chronicle, we would basically live out of the mail. The more we grew, the more overwhelming it became. Now with Chronicle, the documents are automatically loaded from the electronic record into Filevine. That helps filter out the wheat from the chaff, as it were."

That shift also unlocked phase-change automation. When a case is denied at initial stage, Chronicle triggers a phase change in Filevine, which kicks off auto-tasking. Paralegals receive a structured checklist for the next required steps at every case transition. The client experience changed too. Where the firm had been receiving mail days after clients already knew the news, the team could now reach out first.

Garza Law reached 400 active cases in May 2025 and started Chronicle. Twelve months later, the firm is at 1,000 active cases, adding approximately 150 per month.

The shift in daily operations shows up clearly in the mail numbers. What required one to two hours on a Monday morning now takes ten minutes. Not because the mail volume dropped, but because the work of sorting, scanning, labeling, and filing documents the firm already has in Chronicle is nearly eliminated. "Conservative estimate, an hour, maybe two hours on a Monday. And now it is ten minutes, if that."

The proactive posture that Chronicle made possible changed the nature of client relationships.

"We would reach out to clients and they'd say, 'yeah, I got this two days ago. What value is the Garza law firm adding?' With Chronicle, we're now finding out about things as they happen and reaching out to clients before they get that information in the mail."

The case management KPI that matters most: average time from initial application to reconsideration, then from reconsideration to hearing. Each 65-day window the team tightens represents weeks off a client's wait.

The most telling moment came during a team meeting where newer hires were being onboarded. A paralegal who had been with the firm since before Chronicle was explaining how things had changed.

That's the transformation in plain terms: a veteran paralegal, explaining the present to new hires, moved to tears by the contrast.

The phase-change automation contributed to a faster onboarding cycle for new staff as well. "At each point in the process, our paralegals are instructed exactly what action items they need to complete. It allows us to train them faster and just be more responsive."

Michael has heard from firms still running manual ERE workflows, still living out of the mail. He has a clear message for them.

At Garza Law Firm, the Marcos Garza philosophy holds. The boss is the client. That commitment means taking on the cases others pass on and fighting at every stage.

As Michael puts it:

"I sleep at night because I know we are doing everything possible to give the client the best customer experience possible."

He frames the alternative as a professional failure. SSD attorneys gripe about government systems stuck in the seventies. Why hold your own practice to the same standard?

Chronicle is the infrastructure that makes it possible to keep that promise to a thousand clients instead of four hundred. And as Michael puts it: "What Chronicle allows us to do is spend less time on administrative work and more time listening to clients, meeting them where they're at, and working with them to help them overcome the hurdles they're facing and get their cases approved."