Your first thirty days on tortlconnect.

I

Phase one · Days 1–2

Onboarding.

Onboarding is roughly ten minutes of typing and one to two business days of verification on our side. The two clocks do not overlap. You finish the form; we take it from there.

What we need from you.

Bar number and the state it was issued in. The practice areas you actually want to be matched on — not a comprehensive list of every case type you have ever touched, but the ones you want the engine to surface. A declared case-value range. A complexity appetite (strong-liability only, anything, or specifically welcome the messy ones). Your typical contingency percentage. An average response-time commitment. Languages spoken in your practice.

Each of those is a feature input. The engine cannot rank a profile it does not have data for, so the form is the form. Nothing is optional that the algorithm needs.

What we verify.

Bar standing against the state bar of record, plus a disciplinary check. Identity, against the bar registration. Practice area declarations are taken at face value at onboarding; they are cross-checked against your match outcomes over time and surfaced in your dashboard if reality drifts from the declaration.

How long it takes.

One to two business days, typically. The slow step is bar verification, which we batch in the morning and again mid-afternoon. You can finish the form on a Friday night and have a live listing by Tuesday.

II

Phase two · Days 2–3

Your listing goes live.

Once verification clears, your profile is eligible for matches. Eligible is a technical word here: it means you have passed every hard filter the engine will ever apply to you, generically. From this point forward the only thing that gates a particular match is whether you pass the hard filters for that specific case.

The hard filters are jurisdiction (you are licensed in the case's state), practice area (the case type is in your declared list), monthly capacity (you have not yet hit the cap you set), and statute of limitations (the underlying claim has not expired). Everything else is scored, not gated.

The score machine starts running the moment a new case enters the system. Your profile is one of many being evaluated against it; the case is one of many being evaluated against you. Both rankings are produced from the same feature pool with different weights.

Going live is not a marketing event. It is the moment the engine starts treating your declared inputs as ground truth.

III

Phase three · Days 3–7

First matches surface.

Cases that fit your declared practice begin appearing in your dashboard, ranked by score. Each match shows the headline score, a short readable explanation, and — if you want it — the full breakdown.

The breakdown view.

Every score is composed of nine feature contributions on the attorney side. The breakdown view lists them by name, with weight, raw feature value, and the score-point contribution each one made to the final number. You can read it top-to-bottom and see exactly where the score came from.

expectedFeeValue 23

The case's estimated damages multiplied by recovery probability and your typical contingency, normalized against the value range you declared at onboarding. The dominant single feature on the attorney side.

recoveryProbability 19

A composite of liability strength, case-type baseline, tortl verification, and remaining statute runway. The honest probability the case actually pays out.

specialtyDepth 14

How tightly the case type matches your focus area — not just whether you list it, but whether you focus on it.

liabilityAppetite 12

Whether the case's liability grade falls inside the appetite you declared (strong-only, anything, complex-welcome).

intakeCompleteness 11

How much of the case file the consumer has actually filled in. Sparse intake is a leading indicator of a client who will not show up for the consult.

caseComplexity 7

Comparative negligence, multiple insurers, pre-existing conditions, denial history, and liability grade, blended and matched against your complexity appetite.

geoProximity 6

Distance, banded. Same scale as the client view but weighted lower here — attorneys travel.

responseTimeFit 5

Average response hours weighed against case urgency. Weighted lower on the attorney side because you already know your own response time.

languageMatch 3

Whether the consumer's preferred language is covered by your declared languages.

Penalties, if any.

If a feature falls below a defined floor, the entire score is multiplied by a fixed factor. A sub-twenty-percent recovery probability multiplies the score by 0.60. Specialty depth below fifty percent multiplies by 0.85. On the attorney side, an intake completeness below thirty percent multiplies by 0.70. The breakdown view shows you which penalties fired and what they did.

IV

Phase four · Days 5–14

First inquiries arrive.

A match is the engine's opinion. An inquiry is the consumer's. A match becomes an inquiry when the consumer reads your profile, reads the explanation of why you ranked where you did, and chooses to send you their case file with a short message.

What they see.

The consumer sees your name, firm, jurisdiction, declared practice areas, rating with a neutral floor for new listings, average response time, languages, and a short bio. They also see the same headline score you do and the same plain-English explanation of why you ranked where you did. The math is on their side of the screen too.

What you see.

The case file: jurisdiction, case type, intake answers, liability grade, estimated damages, statute runway, and the consumer's message. The case file is shared with you only when the consumer initiates contact. The matching engine reads it to rank; it does not transmit it.

Why response time matters.

responseTimeFit is a weighted feature, but it is also a critical penalty: on urgent cases, a fit score below thirty percent multiplies the entire score by 0.80. An urgent case is one with a short statute window, an active denial in progress, or a consumer-flagged urgency at intake. A 72-hour response time on a case where the statute expires in two weeks does not look like thoughtful caseload management — it looks like a slow lane the engine is correctly steering around.

Response time is the one input that costs nothing to declare and everything to honor. The engine watches both.

V

Phase five · Day 15 and beyond

Steady state.

After the first two weeks the cadence settles. New cases enter the system continuously; matches surface in your dashboard continuously; the engine runs in the background regardless of who is logged in.

The diversity rule.

A pure score-sorted list can concentrate a single attorney at the top of every consumer's results in a given market. The diversity rule rebalances the top of the result set so that no single attorney monopolizes early placements in a market where multiple attorneys are within a small score window. The order of cases you see is not the order they came in — it is the order the engine believes is fair across the cohort.

Founding-cohort bid minimums: waived.

Founding attorneys have bid minimums waived for the first ninety days. That window covers steady-state for your full first month and most of your second. Nothing else about your pricing changes during the waiver — the $149 founding rate is the only line item on your account.

How to pause.

Pause is a single toggle in your dashboard. It removes you from the match pool and halts billing — the $149 base does not bill while your listing is paused — without canceling your listing or forfeiting your founding rate. Use it when you hit your own caseload limit, when you are out on trial, or when you simply need a quiet week. Unpause when you want matches back, and the $149 resumes on your next billing date.

What changes after day 30

Three quiet shifts.

The first thirty days are the soft-start window. After day thirty, three things change — none of them dramatic, all of them documented.

Bid minimums activate.

For non-founding listings, the bid minimum on selected match tiers becomes part of the per-match accounting. Founding listings stay inside the ninety-day waiver, so this changes nothing for the founding cohort until day ninety.

Response-time history starts feeding the score.

For the first thirty days, responseTimeFit is computed from your declared average. After day thirty, the engine begins blending in your actual measured response times to the inquiries you have received. The declared number does not vanish — it is now a baseline the measured number is averaged against.

Ratings begin to matter.

The reputation feature carries a neutral floor for new listings. After day thirty, completed-consult feedback begins replacing the floor with actual data. A clean track record is not penalized for being short; it is simply still the floor until consumers have something to weigh in on.

None of these shifts requires anything from you on the day they happen. They are described here so the curve is not a surprise.