How Lone Star Attorney Service replaced a 12-step manual onboarding process with an app built with Claude

The starting point

Lone Star Attorney Service is a Houston process-serving company: law firms hire it to hand-deliver citations, subpoenas and writs and file the affidavit. It covers every metro area in Texas and handles thousands of jobs a month with a small in-house team and a network of contract process servers.

Raj Kankaria acquired the business in June 2025 and nearly doubled its volume in the first year. A preferred-vendor partnership with InfoTrack, the parent company of the firm's job-management platform, was expected to triple volume again over the summer of 2026. The operation runs on Gmail, ServeManager and Ramp, and almost every step between them was a person copying information from one to the next. Growth at that rate meant either hiring ahead of volume or taking the manual steps out.

Kankaria had already built a first Claude automation himself. What he wanted was a system the team could run: Claude working through a known set of tasks every morning without being prompted, and a team trained to build and maintain those tasks.

Lone Star engaged Shannon Advisory in April 2026: an on-site kickoff in Houston, remote work in between, and a second visit in May.

The onboarding problem

Shannon spent the first day on site shadowing the team rather than presenting. The biggest single item on legal assistant Soha Jivani's list was onboarding new process servers.

Jivani's written procedure ran to 12 steps: a welcome email, collecting missing details, creating the company record in ServeManager, setting up payables, sending the ServeManager invite, creating the vendor in Ramp, a confirmation email, waiting for both systems to confirm, a second welcome email, a county-specific pay email, and updating the internal server spreadsheet. "I do this all manually," she said. "I copy and paste it every single time." Each server took about 20 minutes, and a job posting could bring in 30 or 40 applicants at once.

The onboarding app

Shannon built a replacement in Claude Code, using Jivani's procedure document as the specification. A single form on a Lone Star subdomain replaced the interest form on the company website. Each submission files the application and W-9 to Drive, logs to the tracking sheet, sends the welcome email and the correct Ramp instructions (Harris-area and out-of-county servers are routed automatically), alerts the intake mailbox, and creates the ServeManager company record and Ramp vendor record through each system's API.

The app went live in late June. By mid-July, Jivani put her hands-on time per server at "a minute per job, max."

Applications have arrived at a pace of roughly 80 a year since launch, which returns about 25 hours of Jivani's time annually. The shape matters more than the number: a 40-applicant batch that once meant 13 hours of copy-and-paste is now under an hour of review, and the bottleneck is gone as Lone Star scales its server network for the InfoTrack volume.

Handing over the keys

Lone Star's deliverables were always meant to stay with Lone Star. On August 3, Shannon transferred the app in full: code repositories moved to a Lone Star GitHub organization, front end redeployed on Lone Star's hosting, backend and API credentials recreated under Kankaria's Google account, and an end-to-end test run live on the call, with operations and ownership guides covering pay rates, email copy, routing and API settings. Jivani, who set up the accounts herself, plans to maintain it with Claude: "It wouldn't be too hard to figure out with Claude."

Claude on every desktop

The app was one deliverable. The other was a team that could keep building without Shannon in the room.

The second and third mornings of the April visit were workshops: "Claude 101" on projects, connectors and prompting with the team's real files, then "Intro to Cowork" on delegating and scheduling multi-step work. By the end of the visit, everyone in the office had Claude installed and connected to Google Drive, Gmail and Ramp.

Two weeks later, Kankaria described the change: "Everyone has taken that and run with it and taught themselves how to use Claude. Maybe not to its fullest potential, but I do feel the office getting more productive. A lot more things are getting done in a day."

The operations manager used Claude to turn the company's training material into a narrated video, a job Jivani put at five hours, finished in about ten minutes. The finance lead built a skill to post ACH and online payments from the multi-page remittance statements clients send. "That's a three- to four-hour process," Jivani said. "Claude is doing it in five to ten minutes." The weekly team meeting now opens with a round of what each person used Claude for that week.

A knowledge base and daily routines

Shannon then built the foundation the automations reference: a shared Google Drive of Lone Star's client policies, service standards and contacts, structured as Claude Projects by function (Harris County operations, out-of-county operations, billing, skip trace) with reusable skills as plain markdown files. The Drive is the source of truth, so nothing is locked to one tool, and any employee can propose a skill for Kankaria to approve.

The second visit, May 18–19, had one goal for the training day: everyone leaves with a scheduled task running in Cowork.

Jivani's first task took about 25 minutes to configure. Every morning at 8:00, Claude reads her inbox, acknowledges intake emails, pre-drafts her emails to defendants with the matching ServeManager note, and leaves the drafts for her review. Her second task runs at 8:30: a daily report of pending affidavits, skip traces with rush jobs first, and anything awaiting instructions that has gone past due.

"It tells me exactly which ones I need to check on if I don't have time to run through all of them," Jivani said. Shannon's estimate when the tasks were built was about an hour a day of Jivani's time, roughly 250 hours a year. The finance lead's payment-posting skill was promoted to the organization-level library the same day.

What Lone Star's rollout shows

• Audit before you train.A day of shadowing produced a better list of automation targets than any questionnaire, including quick wins (Gmail filters for the shared inboxes) that needed no AI.
• Build from the SOP the team already wrote.The onboarding app's spec was Jivani's own 12-step procedure; nothing had to be re-elicited.
• Let people live in chat first.The second visit landed because the team had a month of daily Claude use behind it. As one team member put it, "Now that we mastered the chat, going to Cowork is easier."
• Make the habit visible.The weekly meeting segment did more for adoption than any single training session.

What's next

Lone Star's roadmap includes a daily overdue-job briefing for dispatchers, a ready-to-invoice report, and an attempt-quality checker that flags deficient server notes before they reach a client. Kankaria has also drafted a process-server certification curriculum with Claude so Lone Star can train its own servers. As Lone Star grows and expands into new geographies, Shannon expects to help bring Claude into new teams from the first day rather than retrofitting it.

In their words

About this case study. Published with Lone Star Attorney Service's approval, September 2026. Quotes are taken from recorded calls and working sessions between March and August 2026, starting with the discovery call that preceded the engagement, and edited for length and clarity with conversational filler removed. Figures are Lone Star's own, from its onboarding tracking sheet and team members' descriptions of their work; annualized figures are Shannon Advisory's calculations from those inputs.