Client Stories | Daniel Horowitz

Originally programming his own management database, Daniel Horowitz needed a more advanced, trustworthy software that could calm his late night anxieties and maximize productivity as his firm expanded. CloudLex allowed him to achieve this.

Attorney Daniel Horowitz has been involved in more than his share of high-profile cases, having represented former Ukraine prime minister Pavel Lazarenko, radio personality Michael Savage, and best-selling author Terry McMillan, among others. Yet, when asked about his most memorable case, he immediately mentions a suit he filed on behalf of the parents of toddler Ailee Jong against a Bay Area hospital.

“This is a two-year-old girl who had liver cancer and needed liver resection surgery to be done at a top-tier hospital such as UCSF or Stanford or one of the many great hospitals that do that all the time,” Daniel says. “Instead, she was shunted to a community hospital here in Walnut Creek, and before her surgery, the head of perioperative medicine at that hospital warned, ‘She will die if you do the surgery.’ Despite that warning, they went ahead with it, and she died very, very quickly.”

Although the case was still pending as of early 2024, “the California Medical Board and the California Department of Public Health have descended on this hospital, John Muir Health,” Daniel says. “They have restricted their [pediatric intensive care unit], they forced them to clean up their act, and we have saved, I’m sure, many children who would have died in that substandard institution.”

Decades later, Daniel has made his name as a top trial attorney, appearing as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, and other outlets as well as running his law firm in Lafayette, CA. But his beginnings were much less celebrated. “I only had three choices in my childhood, which was to join the military, become a trial lawyer, or become a criminal,” he says. “You know, I grew up in the streets of New York. I didn’t want to become a criminal, because I didn’t like hurting people. I didn’t want to join the military, because I didn’t want to be hurt. So that left lawyer.”

After graduating from Southwestern Law School in L.A. and settling in California, not being part of “an old boys network” presented a challenge for Daniel. To stand out from the crowd while establishing his personal injury practice, he ran what he says was “the first controversial Yellow Page ad in California history.” Rather than the typical staid legal advertisement, his featured a dancing cash register throwing money in the air. “That ad took off like wildfire,” he recalls. “I was getting people cracking up on the phone calling me saying, You’re the only lawyer I can talk to and I know just from your ad.”

Daniel believes he can stake claim to another first: being the first attorney to bring a computer into a courtroom, in 1983. He progressed from that Gnat computer to a larger one he programmed in dBase, creating an office management database that he used for years.

As his personal injury practice grew, however, his homegrown programming no longer sufficed. He wanted to be able to better delegate tasks, which he believes is key to a successful personal injury practice because it ensures that each case receives personalized attention. But he also wanted “to be able to wake up at three in the morning with anxiety and find out how my cases are moving, which cases were not getting responsiveness from the adjusters, and when the statute of limitations is going to cause me to be sued for malpractice,” he says. “None of those bad things really happen. But as we got bigger, any manual or poorly designed program was not going to be able to answer any paranoid, anxiety-ridden query that I would come up with.”

And they gave me actual wealth of information. They’d thought about everything I said and had a reasoned, factual, scientific answer to everything. So I actually trusted them.”

After implementing CloudLex, Daniel could more easily delegate tasks to team members by allowing him to establish and monitor case milestones. For instance, he set up a rule that within 30 days of his firm taking on a case, all relevant medical records and police reports will have been requested and an assessment made as to whether investigators need to take statements. “And you can track that in CloudLex. You can track it for whether it’s been viewed. You can track it as to whether it’s been done,” he says.

In effect, Daniel and his team use CloudLex as the source of truth: “If it’s not in CloudLex, it doesn’t exist.”

And as the source of truth, CloudLex enables Daniel to review the performance of his practice and its team members. “I will do several sorts on all the cases, whether it’s by statute of limitations, what doctors we’re using, whatever I want to sort on that’s of interest to me. And I will print out the cases and periodically sit down with my staff and grill them: ‘How come we don’t have this report?’” he says. “Then I give assignments, which I can then follow up on because I run the same screen and see what’s changed. And even though I say I’m torturing my staff, they actually like it because they know that I can watch out for where they may be failing or slipping or not on top of their game. And of course I do it in a pleasant way and these are all people I care about. But the point is it allows us to see where we’re 90% good or 80% good or even less and quickly remedy it.”

Although Daniel uses CloudLex to ensure that he and his team are the best they can be, he differentiates that from aiming to be “the best,” a goal he believes is an exercise in futility. “I’ve realized how many really great attorneys are out there, and that’s something that I think young attorneys of people starting out don’t realize,” he says. “You are never going to be ‘the best,’ and you may never even be ‘one of the best.’ You just want to be one of the group of people who takes the job very seriously, does the very best you can for your client, and this machine, which is called the legal system, generally will grind out some modicum of justice.”