Before starting Rossen Law Firm in 2015, founder and CEO Adam Rossen was part of a two-person legal practice, doing everything themselves to keep the day-to-day operations running. Now, his legal firm is operating in six different locations and boasts 21 employees — with a desire to scale further.

Rossen Law Firm is a criminal defense legal team that handles felony and misdemeanor cases, including criminal, DUI, and white collar charges. They joined Trainual to better organize their knowledge management, as well as onboard and train their growing team. And as they continue to expand their reach and reputation across South Florida, they need a platform that will scale with them — and help them deliver the same top-notch service in all of their different offices.

“Trainual is easily one of the top ten best decisions the firm has ever made — maybe top five.”
<blockquoteauthor>Adam Rossen, founder and CEO of Rossen Law Firm<blockquoteauthor>

A company wiki that isn’t a pain to build

When Adam initially left his successful career at the prosecutor’s office to start his own firm in 2008, he and his legal partner were the only two employees. So, they both had to wear a lot of different hats — as attorneys, legal assistants, sales, marketing, and more — just to keep their practice going.

And when they decided to split their firm in 2015, Adam knew he needed to escape the day-to-day operations if he wanted his business to grow. With that thinking in mind, he brought in some help and grew his rebranded firm to six employees by the beginning of 2020. 

“Things were manageable when we had six employees,” Adam shared. “Because ‘Adam, Manny [the managing partner], and Walter [the assistant] know everything’ and can hold everything up.”

Adam knew the business needed some form of company knowledge base where everything was documented, but he kept putting it off — until two big factors forced his hand. The first: When his assistant Walter was in a bad motorcycle accident that left him in a coma for two weeks, no one at the firm really knew how to do anything without him. 

The second: Once Walter had returned, business at the firm took off — they tripled their revenue in a short period of time, and added seven new employees in the span of eight months. But, everything was breaking down because there were no systems in place to ensure that things were being done efficiently.

So, they finally set up their own internal wiki using WordPress — only for it to fail to launch. “As I was doing this, I thought, ‘This is terrible,’” Adam said. “In theory, it was great to have our own internal wiki, but it never got done because it was so daunting.”

But by April 2022, the firm had added even more employees, everything was at a breaking point, and the need for a knowledge management system became a high priority. After demoing a handful of different products, Trainual stood out as the best of the lot — intuitive to use, easy to update, and perfectly set up to train their employees.

“I’m just glad we made the right decision after vetting everybody. I’m a big fan of Trainual.”

A training program that saves thousands in labor costs

While Rossen Law Firm started using Trainual to house their employee handbook and all their operational processes, they soon found that it was also the perfect platform to train their staff — especially during a period of high rotation.

“We cycled employees in and out,” shared Adam. “We had to replace our entire staff because the people who got us to x-hundred thousand in revenue were not going to be the people to get us to x-million in revenue.” 

But Adam and his partner soon realized that they were spending too much of their valuable time onboarding new hires — which ended up being wasted time when those new employees ended up not working out in the long term.

Their breaking point? When the firm hired and onboarded three legal assistants, only to lose them all within six weeks. “I gave the ‘history of the firm’ speech three times in six weeks at an hour each time. That was a waste — no more.”  

Their solution: Make the “History of the Firm” a part of Trainual, so that every onboarded employee learns about the humble beginnings of the business, along with their core values, mission, and vision — without Adam needing to give the speech ever again.

Plus, because Trainual stores the firm’s database of training and resources, their employees can go back to reference anything they need to verify or refresh — even when the initial training is “done.” 

Trainual effectively replaced the need for Adam and Manny to walk new employees through onboarding, and saves them from having to remind employees of processes and policies that they may have forgotten. Ultimately, in Adam’s words, Trainual has saved the firm “six figures in labor training costs over the past year.”

“[Trainual] has saved us so much time and money, and it’s been great for productivity. It’s helped our growth and management, and we love it.”

A system that develops the best of the best employees

As the firm aims to expand into Miami — with the goal of becoming the premier criminal defense firm in all of South Florida — continued and scalable growth is a main focus for Adam, who has stepped back from case work to act as the visionary of the firm. And Trainual has made that growth much more achievable, especially when it comes to training consistent and trustworthy employees.

“Before Trainual, we had one VA [virtual assistant] for marketing, but none for legal. We now have six VA’s — four in legal alone — because Trainual has given everyone a framework to reference,” Adam said.

And with Trainual’s reporting metrics and quizzes, Adam and his team can ensure that employees are really absorbing the training they’re doing — which is so important to the firm that leadership requires employees to get a passing grade of 100%.

“If you fail [the quiz] once or twice, that’s encouraged. We want our people learning and understanding what we’re doing, but more importantly how we’re doing it and why,” Adam said. “I don’t know how many companies require 100%, but we do and we’re proud of it.”

Even with the quizzes, Trainual has been a big hit with the firm’s new hires, who all comment positively on the amount of training the firm provides — along with the organization of their onboarding. 

“We can tell [new hires] not just the what, but the how’s and the why’s and make it consistently accurate.”

With Trainual, Adam and his team know that their training will produce employees who can deliver consistent results — and whose reliability will make the firm’s growth plans all the more viable. And while Adam doesn’t consider their Trainual documentation anywhere near finished, the product has already been fundamental to their growth over the past year, and will continue to contribute as the firm’s expansion efforts move forward.