How Perfected Claims Cut $250K in Salesforce Costs by Building a Composable Legal Tech Stack

The Who

Perfected Claims is a high‑growth legal services firm specializing in managing complex legal claims—often in high-profile mass torts, like the recent Maui Wildfire litigation and its ~$4 billion global settlement. With hundreds of cases, thousands of documents, and countless client interactions flowing through intake, triage, and litigation every week, they faced immense pressure to scale without compromising compliance or client experience.

The CTO had a clear mandate: build a modern, scalable legal tech stack that would support legal professionals, streamline internal workflows, and offer clients a seamless digital experience—without being locked into the costly all-in-one solutions of legacy platforms.

The Problem

Perfected Claims faced critical technical and operational constraints:

• Salesforce Lock-in: Tightly coupled to the Salesforce ecosystem, making it hard to scale without piling on license and compute costs.
• Legacy Document Management: Lacking a modern document management solution, causing friction for staff and clients alike, while incurring excessive storage fees.
• No Real-Time APIs or Analytics: Unable to support real-time APIs or analytics without expensive Salesforce add-ons or custom development.
• Clunky Workflows & Siloed Data: Dependent on clunky workflows and siloed data pipelines, which slowed decision-making and service delivery.
  

They were trying to deliver high-quality legal services with tools that weren’t purpose-built for their scale or budget. What they needed was a flexible, composable solution—and they needed it fast.

“We were operating with enterprise expectations but constrained by enterprise software. Harrier helped us break out of that trap.” – Michael Marsh, CTO at Perfected Claims

The Requirements

Perfected Claims came to Harrier with a vision: deliver a seamless experience for clients and paralegals using Salesforce where it shines—while shifting everything else to more flexible, affordable components.

Key priorities included:

• Best-in-class Document Management: A solution integrated directly into Salesforce.
• Composable API Architecture: An API architecture that could scale without locking into the resource-constrained Mulesoft platform.
• Real-Time Data Pipelines: Real-time reporting for internal ops and client insights.
• Lower Platform Costs: Major reduction in software licensing and storage costs.

They didn’t just want a working system—they wanted the right system, tailored to their unique business, not dictated by vendor lock-in.

The Alternatives

Before engaging Harrier, Perfected Claims explored several paths:

• Expand Salesforce Footprint: With add-ons for storage, reporting, and APIs. The costs spiraled quickly.
• Off-the-Shelf Middleware: Solutions for ETL and document management. Nothing integrated well.
• In-House Development: Building custom tooling in-house. The risk and overhead were too high.

Each of these paths came with compromises—either on cost, maintainability, or functionality. Harrier proposed a better way.

The Solution

Harrier architected a composable, cloud-native platform with Salesforce as the front-end, and the right tools for every job behind the scenes:

• Salesforce (Core, Service Cloud Voice, Experience Cloud): The polished front-end for internal paralegals, customer service reps, and the client portal.
• Custom Document Management System: Fully embedded in Salesforce, this replaced expensive storage add-ons with an AWS-backed solution, saving over $5,000/year.
• Django APIs: A Python-based framework powering secure, scalable integrations between systems.
• FiveTran + DBT: Raw data extraction and transformation, enabling clean, analytics-ready datasets without touching Salesforce compute limits.
• AWS: Provided compute, data storage, monitoring, and security at scale—including API Gateway, RDS, and S3.
• PowerBI: Cost-effective, flexible reporting, offering the same insights as Tableau at a fraction of the price.

The Insights

The Harrier implementation changed how Perfected Claims builds and operates:

• Modularity Over Monoliths: By decoupling data pipelines, APIs, and reporting from Salesforce, they gained full control over performance, cost, and extensibility.
• True API-First Infrastructure: With Django and AWS, they avoided platform lock-in and gave their developers and partners clean interfaces to work with.
• Reporting That Just Works: With FiveTran, DBT, and PowerBI, data became trustworthy, real-time, and easy to explore—without breaking the bank.
• A Document System That Fits the Business: Instead of jamming into Salesforce Files, they now have a robust, integrated document platform that’s easier to use and far cheaper to operate.

“Harrier didn’t just implement Salesforce – they built an architecture. The result is a system that saves us over $250,000/year in licensing and compute costs.” – Michael Marsh, CTO at Perfected Claims

The Results

The platform Harrier delivered drives tangible impact across the organization:

• $250,000/year platform savings by reducing Salesforce license counts, storage, and custom development costs.
• $10,000/month saved via a modern document solution replacing Salesforce Files.
• Faster development cycles and new API-powered service offerings.
• Happier internal teams who now have tools that match their workflow.
• Delighted clients experiencing a seamless, responsive digital experience.

Perfected Claims didn’t just modernize—they future-proofed.

“As CTO, I needed a stack that was scalable, secure, and sane. Harrier delivered that and more. Our systems are leaner, faster, and built for the long haul.” – Michael Marsh, CTO at Perfected Claims