Jay S. Jump: True, it wasn’t really a problem when our kids were little. We would take the work home with us and get them to help us stuff envelopes. But eventually, they figured out that their friends were more interesting and stuffing envelopes was not. When they hit the teenage years, we pretty much lost our slave labor force.
Kathryn Jump: That meant it was back to us and our staff. That took money and time and we couldn’t very well make our staff stay until 8 p.m. every night just to stuff envelopes for three hours. We would pay them $15.00 per hour times three people. The extra labor cost added up quickly and we couldn’t bill our the paralegal staff at $125.00 per hour for stuffing envelopes. Our fee apps would never get approved for that.
Jay S. Jump: So I started searching for a firm that we could outsource our mail to but they just didn’t exist. Our mailings could have 15 creditors, or 500 creditors. No one was interested in doing the printing, stuffing and mailing unless there were going to be 1000’s of the same document. Since no one could provide that service and I knew there were thousands of law firms who also faced this same dilemma, I came up with the idea of www.certificateofservice.com.
Dan LaBert: And the rest is history?
Jay S. Jump: Sort of, we came up with this idea in 2005, when we knew the law was going to change. We knew that we would be facing a shortfall in income from fewer cases being filed. We had to come up with a plan to be able to get buy. Kathryn got her real estate license, I built www.certificateofservice.com and our asset check service, www.debtorduediligence.com. The plan was just to offset the loss of a smaller caseload, but that was back in 2005. I could never have guessed then that we would end up where we are at today.
Dan LaBert: So why would anyone use www.certificateofservice.com?
Kathryn Jump: Two reasons, time and money. We only have so many hours in the day. Jay had three rules in his firm (1) Open Cases, (2) Get Paid, (3) Close Cases. Our focus was to work the cases and get our client’s the best deal we could and be efficient about doing it. The more time he could devote to being a lawyer instead of an office administrator, the better off the client was. It wasn’t efficient to have him stuffing envelopes with us when he could be reading about a new case or filing an objection to claim. It wasn’t efficient for us to stuff envelopes when we couldn’t bill for it, where instead we could be reviewing claims to find grounds for objections or working on petitions, or pretty much doing anything else but stuffing envelopes.
Jay Jump: True, we have to maximize our time. Stuffing envelopes is kind of like taking out the garbage. You have to do it as part of due process, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. But, if you didn’t notice the creditors of everything you were doing, you could end up losing a lot more than just the case. To not notice the parties in the case is to deny the concept of due process and to me, that is malpractice.
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