How Estrella LLC Unified Case Management and Legal Operations on the Mitratech Casecloud Platform

Law Firm Firm Overview

Estrella LLC runs litigation, billing, client intake, and matter reporting for 10 practice areas in one system: Mitratech CaseCloud™, built on Salesforce. Here’s how they got there, and what seven years on the platform actually looks like.

The firm is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with more than 50 years of continuous operation, serving corporate clients and individuals across litigation, corporate and commercial law, labor and employment, bankruptcy, real estate, intellectual property, tax, and general counsel outsourcing.

For years, this operation ran on a collection of disconnected desktop systems: a case management application, a separate billing platform, and an accounting system that didn’t communicate with either. Every matter touched multiple tools, which meant every matter created multiple opportunities for something to fall through the cracks.

Alberto Estrella, managing partner, recognized that the infrastructure wasn’t keeping pace with where the firm needed to go. What he was looking for wasn’t a software upgrade.

The Challenge: Disconnected Systems, Mounting Risk

Managing ten practice areas across siloed desktop software meant that getting a complete picture of any client matter required navigating multiple applications. Billing, case activity, and accounting lived in separate systems with no native integration.

Then Hurricane Maria arrived in September 2017. Estrella had already begun moving toward cloud infrastructure (attorneys had virtual desktops), but the applications running on those desktops were still legacy software: local, siloed, and dependent on physical hardware.

For Alberto, Hurricane Maria wasn’t a wake-up call. It was confirmation that the next step couldn’t wait.

Selecting the Right Foundation

In 2018, Estrella ran what Alberto describes as an exhaustive due diligence process: trial accounts, demo access, and hands-on testing across every cloud-based legal practice management platform available at the time. Two requirements drove the decision above everything else.

The first was customizability. Estrella is a mature firm with established workflows across ten distinct practice areas. Platforms they’d outgrown had required the firm to adapt to the software. Any new platform had to work the other way.
The second was enterprise-grade infrastructure: security certifications, role-based access controls, native integrations, and an interface familiar enough to attorneys that adoption wouldn’t require weeks of retraining.

Both requirements led them to Mitratech CaseCloud™, built on Salesforce.

From Pilot to Firm-Wide Deployment

Rather than attempting a full migration from the start, Estrella ran a targeted proof of concept with one practice area — consumer affairs — and one high-volume client. The entire team working those matters moved exclusively to CaseCloud™. No hybrid approach, no fallback to the old system for that work.

Once the proof of concept validated the platform and produced working custom workflows, Estrella executed a firm-wide migration across all practice areas simultaneously. They moved to CaseCloud™ for case management and Box for cloud document storage, integrated directly within the platform. Access to legacy systems was removed. Staff could view historical data, but they couldn’t work in the old environment.

The Impact of a Unified Platform

One System of Record Across Every Practice Area

The most significant change at Estrella isn’t any single feature. Every practice area now runs on the same platform, uses the same workflows, and appears in the same reports. When anyone opens a matter, the full case history is already there: activity logs, emails, tasks, and events. Any staff member can answer a client call without having to track down whoever worked the file last.

Intake That Closes During the First Call

Matter intake at Estrella used to be a multi-day process: an initial call, a follow-up email, a separately run conflict check, a PDF engagement letter, a faxed signature, a deposit invoice. Then, eventually, a matter opened in the system.

Today, all of that happens during the initial client call. Alberto collects contact information or sends a link to do so. A conflict check runs automatically. An engagement proposal goes out via DocuSign. A trust request with a payment link follows. Once the client signs and pays, the matter opens in CaseCloud™, the engagement letter saves to Box, and the team receives a task to begin work. By the time the call ends, the matter is live.

Reporting That Wins New Business

Early in the CaseCloud™ implementation, Estrella’s team realized that the data they were collecting for internal visibility (including matter trends, legal spend by facility, case type breakdowns, open and closed matter counts) was also useful to clients. The firm began sharing dashboards in client check-in calls, then in new business pitches.

In one case, Estrella was pitching an existing litigation client on their labor and employment work. Rather than a capabilities presentation, Alberto pulled up a live dashboard showing that client’s litigation matters broken down by facility, flagging which locations were generating disproportionate case volume.

The firm has won clients on the strength of this capability alone, demonstrating in a business development conversation the depth of reporting and transparency they can provide. Alberto puts it plainly: Estrella is no longer just a service provider to those clients. The data makes the difference.

Adoption That Sticks, Even for the Skeptics

One senior partner, a top firm performer, was openly opposed to time entry. He had his assistant do it for him and said he’d rather be let go than enter his own time. Sometime after the CaseCloud™ migration, Alberto walked past his office and found him quietly entering time on his own.

CaseCloud™ won him over not by listing features, but by being less friction than the workaround he’d spent years defending.

Customized for Each Practice, Consistent for Operations

Matter views are customized by practice area and record type. A labor and employment matter surfaces different fields than a licensing or IP matter. For leadership, standardized indicators across the platform mean consistent visibility regardless of which practice area is being reviewed. No one has to learn a different system to understand what’s happening firm-wide.

A More Resilient Operation

Estrella has operated through two significant disruptions — Hurricane Maria and a global pandemic — without losing access to a single matter, document, or client record. Peers still running on-premises infrastructure during the storm lost days or weeks of operational capacity. Estrella did not.

Business continuity isn’t something firms think about until they need it. Estrella needed it. The infrastructure held.

Seven Years In

Estrella is still actively building on the platform. Alberto’s team reviews workflows, fields, and forms every few months as the platform and their practice evolve. What started with intake automation has expanded to include repeatable workflows, activity plans, and deposition process workflows.