Longbow isn't a startup that picked legal as a market. It's software that has been holding real Illinois plaintiff firms' case files together for years — and Longbow is the rebuild those firms asked for.
The original Longbow is a Windows application that has run the day-to-day of Illinois plaintiff personal injury and workers' compensation firms for years. Not a pilot, not a side project — the actual system those firms open every morning to find a file, calendar a court date, and work up a settlement.
That software knows things a general-purpose product doesn't. It knows an Illinois comp settlement isn't a generic number. It knows a PI file and a comp file need different screens. It knows what a plaintiff firm's staff actually does between intake and disbursement, because it was shaped by watching them do it.
What that Windows app couldn't do was follow anyone out of the office. It couldn't put email next to the case. It couldn't sync a court date to Outlook. It couldn't read a medical record. And it certainly couldn't do any of the things that became possible in the last few years.
So Longbow is a genuine rebuild on the Microsoft stack these firms already run — Entra sign-in, Outlook, Word, Azure — with the domain knowledge from the original carried forward intact. Same file numbers. Same case history. Different century.
We're not trying to serve every practice area in every state. Family law firms, criminal defense, transactional practices — those are all better served by somebody else. Longbow is for Illinois plaintiff personal injury and workers' compensation, and every decision gets made in that context.
We're also not shipping features to check a box on a comparison chart. The public roadmap on this site lists what isn't built yet, on purpose, because a vendor who won't tell you what's missing is telling you something.
Longbow is running on Azure with firms in beta today — about half the people on the current Windows app are already working in it. The Windows app keeps running alongside it, so no firm faces a day where they can't open a file.
We're taking ten founding firms into early access. If your practice looks like the ones we've spent years inside, we'd like to talk.